173 citations · 609 across the 20 of their papers we have counts for
9 papers · 1 filter
Emergent competition shapes the ecological properties of multi-trophic ecosystems
Zhijie Feng, Robert Marsland, Jason W. Rocks +1
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theo…
Cross-feeding shapes both competition and cooperation in microbial ecosystems
Pankaj Mehta, Robert Marsland
Recent work suggests that cross-feeding -- the secretion and consumption of metabolic biproducts by microbes -- is essential for understanding microbial ecology. Yet how cross-feed…
Tregs self-organize into a "computing ecosystem" and implement a sophisticated optimization algorithm for mediating immune response
Robert Marsland, Owen Howell, Andreas Mayer +1
Regulatory T cells (Tregs) play a crucial role in mediating immune response. Yet an algorithmic understanding of the role of Tregs in adaptive immunity remains lacking. Here, we pr…
Data-driven modeling reveals a universal dynamic underlying the COVID-19 pandemic under social distancing
Robert Marsland, Pankaj Mehta
We show that the COVID-19 pandemic under social distancing exhibits universal dynamics. The cumulative numbers of both infections and deaths quickly cross over from exponential gro…
Niche theory for mutualism: A graphical approach to plant-pollinator network dynamics
Fernanda S. Valdovinos, Robert Marsland
Contemporary Niche Theory is a useful framework for understanding how organisms interact with each other and with their shared environment. Its graphical representation, popularize…
Effect of resource dynamics on species packing in diverse ecosystems
Wenping Cui, Robert Marsland, Pankaj Mehta
The competitive exclusion principle asserts that coexisting species must occupy distinct ecological niches (i.e. the number of surviving species can not exceed the number of resour…
A minimal model for microbial biodiversity can reproduce experimentally observed ecological patterns
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Pankaj Mehta
Surveys of microbial biodiversity such as the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) and the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) have revealed robust ecological patterns across different enviro…
The Community Simulator: A Python package for microbial ecology
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Joshua Goldford +1
Natural microbial communities contain hundreds to thousands of interacting species. For this reason, computational simulations are playing an increasingly important role in microbi…
The Minimum Environmental Perturbation Principle: A New Perspective on Niche Theory
Robert Marsland, Wenping Cui, Pankaj Mehta
Fifty years ago, Robert MacArthur showed that stable equilibria optimize quadratic functions of the population sizes in several important ecological models. Here, we generalize thi…