Conveners
Recent progress in evolutionary theory: Coevolution, diversity, and networks: Part A
- Akira Sasaki (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI))
- Ulf Dieckmann (Evolution and Ecology Program (EEP), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria)
Recent progress in evolutionary theory: Coevolution, diversity, and networks: Part B
- Ulf Dieckmann (Evolution and Ecology Program (EEP), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria)
- Akira Sasaki (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI))
Description
Modern evolutionary theory is developing to enable the study of increasingly structured and realistic complex adaptive systems undergoing eco-evolutionary dynamics. On the one hand, studies capturing feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary drivers reveal unexpected consequences of variable fitness landscapes resulting from frequency-dependent selection and interspecific interactions, such as evolutionary branching, selection-driven extinction, and coevolutionary cycling or chaos. The resultant models are particularly suited for understanding processes of community coevolution and evolving diversity. On the other hand, studies analyzing evolution on networks reveal unexpected consequences of different interaction topologies, such as network reciprocity, cascading dynamics, and phase transitions. Increasingly, models are being devised to capture feedbacks between the adaptive evolution on networks and the adaptive evolution of networks. This minisymposium offers complementary perspectives across a range of recent advances.
Walking through any forest, one is struck by the variety of plant forms coexisting. To explain vegetation structure and diversity, models must allow for multiple species to coexist, and ultimately, predict the outcome of community assembly in different environments. In this talk, I describe how adaptive dynamics theory provides a new framework for predicting the mixtures of species traits that...
Diversification and extinction are ubiquitously repeated in the evolutionary histories of biological communities. A minimal mechanism for driving the repeated diversification and extinction is a combination of resource competition in one trait and a weak directional selection in another trait; resource competition induces diversification in the first trait, but inevitably nonuniform...
Mutualism based on reciprocal exchange of costly services must avoid exploitation by “free-rides”. Accordingly, hosts discriminate against free-riding symbionts in many mutualistic relationships. However, as the selective advantage of discriminators comes from the presence of variability in symbiont quality that they eliminate, discrimination and thus mutualism have been considered to be...
Analyzing humankind’s interactions with our collective environment typically requires understanding eco-evolutionary dynamics in complex adaptive systems. This is especially important for mitigating anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere, managing the multifaceted services provided by ecosystems, and shaping social interactions among agents utilizing these systems. Understanding complex...
Identifying the epidemiological key-stone communities in a metapopulation network is primarily important in designing efficient control against an infectious disease. Various network centrality measures commonly utilized for this purpose haven’t directly focused on the most important measure in epidemiology: the basic reproductive number, $R_0$, of epidemiological dynamics on the network,...
The abundance of a pollinator species can be affected by other pollinators sharing the nutrients from the same plants. Such an exploitative competition between the animal species may affect the species abundance the network structure of plant-pollinator mutualistic communities, which remains to be understood. Here we study a model of the mutualistic network evolution towards increasing the...