Résumé |
Interactions between species can lead to fluctuations in their population sizes. This is well understood in few-species communities, such as predator-prey systems, and explained in terms of dynamical models of interacting populations with few degrees of freedom. However, many natural ecosystems, from microbes in a grain of soil to plants in a rainforest, are home to a great variety of species. What kind of dynamical behavior should we then expect? I will present recent theoretical work using concepts from the physics of disordered systems to address this question. Connections to experiments will be discussed and similarities and key differences with other fields, such as glasses and neural networks, will be highlighted. |