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Congratulations!

BioND lab congratulates its former members Sebastian Kuschner and Fanqi Zeng to their new jobs. Basti is moving on to do a PhD with Tiago Peixoto in Vienna following the completion of his master thesis. Fanqi is moving to a PostDoc position in Oxford to apply his agent-based modelling skills in Sociology.

Publications

Defector avoidance on youtube

Jana is back from ISME

Paper published:

Sharp thresholds limit the benefit of defector avoidance in cooperation on networks

Consider a cooperation game on a spatial network of habitat patches, where players can relocate between habitats if they judge the local conditions to be unfavorable. In time, the relocation events may lead to a homogeneous state where all patches harbor the same densities of cooperators and defectors or they may lead to self-organized patterns, where some patches become safe havens that maintain a high cooperator density. Here we analyze the transition between these states mathematically. We show that safe havens form once a certain threshold in connectivity is crossed. This threshold can be analytically linked to the structure of the patch network and specifically to certain network motifs. Surprisingly, a forgiving defector-avoidance strategy may be most favorable for cooperators. Our results demonstrate that the analysis of cooperation games in ecologically-inspired metacommunity models is mathematically tractable and has the potential to link diverse topics such as macroecological patterns, behavioral evolution, and network topology.

Pedro's trip to Sylt

People

HIFMB Retreat

The whole team had a lot of fun at the HIFMB retreat. After 2 years of virtual meetings it was good to meet in person. Due to the very close proximity most of the lab was able to travel to the retreat in a carbon neutral way, which is an added benefit.

Conferences are back

Paper published:

Network Robustness Revisited

The robustness of complex networks was one of the first phenomena studied after the inception of network science. However, many contemporary presentations of this theory do not go beyond the original papers. Here we revisit this topic with the aim of providing a deep but didactic introduction. We pay attention to some complications in the computation of giant component sizes that are commonly ignored. Following an intuitive procedure, we derive simple formulas that capture the effect of common attack scenarios on arbitrary (configuration model) networks. We hope that this easy introduction will help new researchers discover this beautiful area of network science.

Grant Success!

An EU proposal in which we participate has been recommended for funding with a perfect 15/15 score and is now at contract negotiation stage. More soon.

Paper published:

Generalized Structural Kinetic Modeling

Many current challenges involve understanding the complex dynamical interplay between the constituents of systems. Typically, the number of such constituents is high, but only limited data sources on them are available. Conventional dynamical models of complex systems are rarely mathematically tractable and their numerical exploration suffers both from computational and data limitations. Here we review generalized modeling, an alternative approach for formulating dynamical models to gain insights into dynamics and bifurcations of uncertain systems. We argue that this approach deals elegantly with the uncertainties that exist in real world data and enables analytical insight or highly efficient numerical investigation. We provide a survey of recent successes of generalized modeling and a guide to the application of this modeling approach in future studies such as complex integrative ecological models.

New Building

Submission Madness

The end of the year is now officially approaching and as always there are still tons of things that need to be finished. We submitted three manuscripts this week and at least one more will be submitted early December.

Fastnet.jl published

Our network simulation package Fastnet is now an official Julia package.

Using Fastnet one can easily implement discrete event network simulations

Our AIS station has moved to the coast

New Group Member

Our new researcher Rana has arrived. Welcome to Oldenburg!