Condensed Matter/Materials & Biological Physics Seminar with James O'Dwyer on Stability, Neutrality, and Wheels within Wheels

James O'Dwyer (Hosted by Tikhonov) from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign will be presenting the seminar "Stability, Neutrality, and Wheels within Wheels"

In modeling ecological interactions and dynamics, it is common to assume that dynamics through time are primarily driven by pairwise interactions between species. The drawback is that it is typically not clear just how these pairwise interaction strengths should be expected to change with environmental context, as that context is not incorporated explicitly into these models.  Here we'll cover recent developments in modeling the consumption and exchange of resources as a way to understand how interactions are mediated, and how they change change with environmental context. We go on to show how these processes may emerge from intra-organism dynamics. Finally, we develop stochastic versions of the models, and demonstrate a transition between regimes that resemble neutral and niche-dominated dynamics and static patterns. If time allows, I’ll show some recent work on more general stochastic models with individual variation, and their consequences for coexistence and stability.