Speaker
Description
In this talk, I will address some timely questions in theoretical ecology by discussing the Generalized Lotka-Volterra model in the presence of many randomly interacting species and finite demographic fluctuations. Leveraging on disordered systems’ techniques, I will unveil a rich, eventually hierarchical, organization of the equilibria and relate the slowing down of dynamical correlators to glassy-like features. Such a framework works surprisingly well also for integrating and interpreting datasets of patients suffering from Chron's disease, for which a statistically rigorous description is still missing.
Finally, I will discuss possible generalizations to non-logistic growth functions allowing us, on the one hand, to capture positive feedback mechanisms ("Allee effect"), and, on the other hand, to pinpoint new phase transitions as a smoking-gun signature of criticality.
