V. Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An Earthtwinian Genesis Synthesis

6. Dynamic Fractal Network Ecosystems

Madsen, Anastasia and Shermin de Silva. Societies with fission–fusion dynamics as complex adaptive systems: the importance of scale.. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.. July, 2024. This paper in a special Connected interactions: enriching food web research by spatial and social interactions issue by UC San Diego behavioral ecologists is a good example of how the complexity sciences can be applied to foster a new phase of integral understandings. See also herein From nets to networks: tools for deciphering phytoplankton metabolic interactions within communities and their global significance by Charlotte Nef, et al which provides a further network dimension

In this article, we argue that social systems with fission–fusion (FF) dynamics are best characterized within a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework. We discuss how endogenous and exogenous factors drive scale-dependent network properties across temporal, spatial and social domains. Importantly, this view treats the dynamics themselves as objects of study. CAS theories allow us to interrogate FF activities in taxa that do not conform to prior views of sociality and suggest new questions regarding stability and change in social systems, that would lead to system-level reorganization. (Excerpt)

Margalef, Roman. Exosomatic Structures and Captive Energies Relevant in Succession and Evolution. Jorgensen, Sven and Felix Muller, eds. Handbook of Ecosystems Theories and Management. Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers, 2000. A novel view of evolution as due to self-organized information which is contained in increasingly efficient external storage and retrieval systems.

Marquet, Pablo. Of Predators, Prey, and Power Laws. Science. 295/2229, 2002. An example of how complexity science is now articulating the intricate natural realm previously seen as intractably tangled.

As has been demonstrated, power laws are ubiquitous within local ecosystems and may hold the clue to understanding large-scale patterns in the structure and function of biodiversity. (2230)

Martinez-Garcia, Ricardo, et al.. Spatial Patterns in Ecological Systems: From Microbial Colonies to Landscapes. Emerging Topics in Life Sciences. 6/3, 2022. Instituto de Física Teórica UNESP, Brazil, Princeton University (Cornia Tarnita) and Rutgers University ecotheorists describe their current findings that Quite fulfill our 21st century survey and expectation from only patchy, spurious instances to this well grounded evident presence of whole scale as a robust confirmation as this across every everion and bioregion. See also Phase-separation Physics Underlies New Theory for the Resilience of Patchy Ecosystems by Koen Siteur, et al in PNAS (120/2, 2023.)

Self-organized spatial patterns are ubiquitous in ecological systems and allow them to adopt non-trivial spatial distributions from disordered configurations. These patterns form due to diverse nonlinear interactions among organisms and their environment which lead to the emergence of new properties unique to self-organized systems. Here, we establish two categories depending on whether the self-organization is driven by nonlinear density-dependent demographic rates or movements from microbial colonies to whole environments. (Abstract)

McGuirl, Melissa, et al. Topological Data Analysis of Zebrafish Patterns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117/5113, 2020. Self-organized pattern behavior is ubiquitous throughout nature from fish schooling to collective cell dynamics. (1) Biomathematicans MM and Bjorn Sandstede, Brown University, and Alexandria Volkening, Northwestern University provide an example of how widely this natural propensity has become accepted in practice. In the early 2000s, it was hardly mentioned anywhere. In 2020, a universality of local interactive agents from which a global phase arises is strongly evident. After citing this common source, the paper describes an instance by the way it shapes aquatic scale formations.

Meron, Ehud. Nonlinear Physics of Ecosystems. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2015. In this volume which seeks to join these far-removed yet intimately related domains, a Blaustein Institute for Desert Research and Ben-Gurion University physicist specifies and explains how living environments exemplify a spontaneous self-organization via complex dynamical systems of self-similar pattern formation. Nature’s entanglement can at last be shown to exhibit an integral universality of scales, periodicities, fractal shapes, symmetry breaks, reciprocities, and so on across vegetation, species, communities, and biodiversities.

Miele, Vincent and Catherine Matias. Revealing the Hidden Structure of Dynamic Ecological Networks. arXiv:1701.01335. University of Lyon and University of Paris Diderot biomathematicians conceive a method by which to discern nature’s vital, interactive relations between creatures and environs, which are not readily perceptible by a particulate focus.

Recent technological advances and long-term data studies provide interaction data that can be modelled through dynamic networks, i.e a sequence of different snapshots of an evolving ecological network. Most often time is the parameter along which these networks evolve but any other one-dimensional gradient (temperature, altitude, depth, humidity) could be considered. Here we propose a statistical tool to analyse the underlying structure of these networks and follow its evolution dynamics. It consists in extracting the main features of these networks and summarise them into a high-level view. We analyse a dynamic animal contact network and a seasonal food web and in both cases we show that our approach allows for the identification of a backbone organisation as well as interesting temporal variations at the individual level. (Abstract)

Montiglio, Puerre-Olivier, et al. Nested Interaction Networks Represent a Missing Link in the Study of Behavioural and Community Ecology. arXiv:1804.00927. The six person team has postings in Canada, Germany, USA and the UK, and cites themselves as an EcoEvoInteract Scientific Network. When we began this section around 2000, complex ecosystem patterns were sparsely evident and not well quantified. Network theories were in early stages, and not widely applied. This posting in the later 2010s is a good example of their pervasive utility as flora and fauna become treated just the same as physiologies. For example, an illustration displays wholes within wholes from genes to phenotypes to populations, via a typical node-link reciprocity.

Interactions are ubiquitous across biological systems. These interactions can be abstracted as patterns of connections among distinct units which form a hierarchy of biological organisation: gene and protein networks shape phenotypic traits and together constitute individuals, individuals are embedded within populations, populations within communities, and communities within ecosystems. The concept of nested biological networks is implicit in a variety of disciplines ranging from the study of genetic circuits regulating phenotypic trait expression, to the study of predator-prey interactions influencing community composition. Here, we formalise nested networks as having nodes that can contain, or be embedded in, other nodes, and where edges can bridge connections between sets of embedded nodes. We focus on two phenomena in particular: (i) indirect connections among units can arise from the structure of connections at higher or lower levels of organisation, (ii) the propagation of effects across neighbouring hierarchical levels of organization. (Abstract)

Montoya, Jose and Ricard Sole. Small World Patterns in Food Webs. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 214/3, 2002. The property of complex networks to develop a power-law distribution of interlinked nodes is here shown to apply for dynamic ecosystem communities.

Moreno-Spiegelberg, Pablo, et al. How spatiotemporal dynamics can enhance ecosystem resilience.. PNAS. 122/11, 2025. P M-S and Damià Gomila, IFISC Campus Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain and Max Rietkerk, Utrecht University, provide a latest quantification of how environmental stresses can spawn spontaneous advantageous responses and rearrangements. Novel, widespread understandings like this are then seen to provide guidance for effective mitigations.

In hard environmental conditions, vegetation self-organizes heterogeneous landscapes that increase ecosystem resilience. In this paper, we study plant species that accumulate toxins in the soil and generate complex spatiotemporal landscapes in traveling patterns where the toxin–plant interaction is globally reduced. Our results can predict regime shifts due to climate change and apply to a whole family of ecosystems with plant–soil interactions. (Significance)

Mouillot, David, et al. The Fractal Model. OIKOS. 90/3, 2000. An exploration of a self-similar geometry which can be applied to characterize species abundance and distribution.

Nathan, Marco. Molecular Ecosystems. Biology & Philosophy. Online September, 2013. A University of Denver philosopher traces in the recent literature how the term “ecosystem” is used in an analogous way for life’s other, often much removed, scalar phases such as biomolecular phenomena. Nathan avers that this is a valid metaphor for living systems which repeat their form and function, patterns and processes, at each sequential domain. Thus it is fair to enter a “microcosm – macrocosm” identity, along with a similar tendency to “individuation” at each nested instance. To note once more, as such a holistic purview becomes possible, all evolution and each organism do indeed reveal a necessary reiteration and recapitulation, as intuited by every age and culture.

In sum, we can distinguish between two models of ecosystem individuation: a physiognomic approach – which begins with a preliminary circumscription of the system and then works “inwards” to explore the ecological structure of the territory – and a component-specific approach, which starts by selecting the population(s) of reference and then works “outwards,” looking at their distribution and the totality of their interactions. Recent advances in genetics and molecular biology revealed that development is the product of a series of discrete and interacting modules, which allow the tinkering of finely-tuned and complex processes without wreaking havoc to the entire organism. I argue that our two modes of ecological individuation – physiognomic and component-specific – correspond to two distinct strategies for individuating developmental modules. (6)

In sum, I distinguished between two modes of individuation. The first, physiognomic mode, circumscribes a system in terms of physical discontinuities. The second, component-specific, mode focuses on the distribution and activity of selected populations embedded within a larger system, allowing a more fine-grained individuation of units, even in the absence of real or alleged “natural boundaries.” These two approaches can be employed both in ecology and in molecular-developmental biology. (8) A further analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm emerges as soon as we switch from ecosystem ecology to a different biological subfiels: community ecology. (8)

The aim of this article was to analyze striking resemblance between the cellular environment and the biosphere. In the first part, I focused on three analogies between the ecological macrocosm and the molecular microcosm. First, I distinguished two approaches for the individuation of ecological and molecular systems – physiognomic and component-specific. Second, I showed that molecular environments display several processes and interactions characteristic of ecological communities, such as competition, predation, mutualism, and metabolic cooperation. (9)

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10  Next  [More Pages]