The abundance of a species population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a well-defin
ed double-exponential (Laplace) distribution. This striking regularity allows us to devise a stochastic model despite seemingly irregular variations in population abundances. The model identifies the effect of reduced growth at low population density as a key factor missed in current approaches of population variability analysis and without which extinction risks are severely underestimated. The model also allows us to separate the effect of demographic stochasticity and show that single-species growth rates are dominantly determined by stochasticity common to all species. This dominance---and the implications it has for interspecies correlations, including co-extinctions---emphasizes the need of ecosystem-level management approaches to reduce the extinction risk of the individual species themselves.
We study the Krapivsky-Redner (KR) network growth model but where new nodes can connect to any number of existing nodes, $m$, picked from a power-law distribution $p(m)sim m^{-alpha}$. Each of the $m$ new connections is still carried out as in the KR
model with probability redirection $r$ (corresponding to degree exponent $gamma_{rm KR}=1+1/r$, in the original KR model). The possibility to connect to any number of nodes resembles a more realistic type of growth in several settings, such as social networks, routers networks, and networks of citations. Here we focus on the in-, out-, and total-degree distributions and on the potential tension between the degree exponent $alpha$, characterizing new connections (outgoing links), and the degree exponent $gamma_{rm KR}(r)$ dictated by the redirection mechanism.
We propose a bare-bones stochastic model that takes into account both the geographical distribution of people within a country and their complex network of connections. The model, which is designed to give rise to a scale-free network of social conne
ctions and to visually resemble the geographical spread seen in satellite pictures of the Earth at night, gives rise to a power-law distribution for the ranking of cities by population size (but for the largest cities) and reflects the notion that highly connected individuals tend to live in highly populated areas. It also yields some interesting insights regarding Gibrats law for the rates of city growth (by population size), in partial support of the findings in a recent analysis of real data [Rozenfeld et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 18702 (2008)]. The model produces a nontrivial relation between city population and city population density and a superlinear relationship between social connectivity and city population, both of which seem quite in line with real data.
We formulate a mathematical model for daily activities of a cow (eating, lying down, and standing) in terms of a piecewise affine dynamical system. We analyze the properties of this bovine dynamical system representing the single animal and develop a
n exact integrative form as a discrete-time mapping. We then couple multiple cow oscillators together to study synchrony and cooperation in cattle herds. We comment on the relevant biology and discuss extensions of our model. With this abstract approach, we not only investigate equations with interesting dynamics but also develop interesting biological predictions. In particular, our model illustrates that it is possible for cows to synchronize emph{less} when the coupling is increased.
A common goal in the study of high dimensional and complex system is to model the system by a low order representation. In this letter we propose a general approach for assessing the quality of a reduced order model for high dimensional chaotic syste
ms. The key of this approach is the use of optimal shadowing, combined with dimensionality reduction techniques. Rather than quantify the quality of a model based on the quality of predictions, which can be irrelevant for chaotic systems since even excellent models can do poorly, we suggest that a good model should allow shadowing by modeled data for long times; this principle leads directly to an optimal shadowing criterion of model reduction. This approach overcomes the usual difficulties encountered by traditional methods which either compare systems of the same size by normed-distance in the functional space, or measure how close an orbit generated by a model is to the observed data. Examples include interval arithmetic computations to validate the optimal shadowing.
Determining the effect of structural perturbations on the eigenvalue spectra of networks is an important problem because the spectra characterize not only their topological structures, but also their dynamical behavior, such as synchronization and ca
scading processes on networks. Here we develop a theory for estimating the change of the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix or the extreme eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian when small but arbitrary set of links are added or removed from the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approximation schemes using both real and artificial networks, showing in particular that we can accurately obtain the spectral ranking of small subgraphs. We also propose a local iterative scheme which computes the relative ranking of a subgraph using only the connectivity information of its neighbors within a few links. Our results may not only contribute to our theoretical understanding of dynamical processes on networks, but also lead to practical applications in ranking subgraphs of real complex networks.
Full understanding of synchronous behavior in coupled dynamical systems beyond the identical case requires an explicit construction of the generalized synchronization manifold, whether we wish to compare the systems, or to understand their stability.
Nonetheless, while synchronization has become an extremely popular topic, the bulk of the research in this area has been focused on the identical case, specifically because its invariant manifold is simply the identity function, and there have yet to be any generally workable methods to compute the generalized synchronization manifolds for non-identical systems. Here, we derive time dependent PDEs whose stationary solution mirrors exactly the generalized synchronization manifold, respecting its stability. We introduce a novel method for dealing with subtle issues with boundary conditions in the numerical scheme to solve the PDE, and we develop first order expansions close to the identical case. We give several examples of increasing sophistication, including coupled non-identical Van der Pol oscillators. By using the manifold equation, we also discuss the design of coupling to achieve desired synchronization.
We study Kleinberg navigation (the search of a target in a d-dimensional lattice, where each site is connected to one other random site at distance r, with probability proportional to r^{-a}) by means of an exact master equation for the process. We s
how that the asymptotic scaling behavior for the delivery time T to a target at distance L scales as (ln L)^2 when a=d, and otherwise as L^x, with x=(d-a)/(d+1-a) for a<d, x=a-d for d<a<d+1, and x=1 for a>d+1. These values of x exceed the rigorous lower-bounds established by Kleinberg. We also address the situation where there is a finite probability for the message to get lost along its way and find short delivery times (conditioned upon arrival) for a wide range of as.
We derive a master stability function (MSF) for synchronization in networks of coupled dynamical systems with small but arbitrary parametric variations. Analogous to the MSF for identical systems, our generalized MSF simultaneously solves the linear
stability problem for near-synchronous states (NSS) for all possible connectivity structures. We also derive a general sufficient condition for stable near-synchronization and show that the synchronization error scales linearly with the magnitude of parameter variations.Our analysis underlines significant roles played by the Laplacian eigenvectors in the study of network synchronization of near-identical systems.
We derive variational equations to analyze the stability of synchronization for coupled near-identical oscillators. To study the effect of parameter mismatch on the stability in a general fashion, we define master stability equations and associated m
aster stability functions, which are independent of the network structure. In particular, we present several examples of coupled near-identical Lorenz systems configured in small networks (a ring graph and sequence networks) with a fixed parameter mismatch and a large Barabasi-Albert scale-free network with random parameter mismatch. We find that several different network architectures permit similar results despite various mismatch patterns.
