Seminar series
Date
Tue, 13 Oct 2026
Time
15:00 -
16:00
Location
C3
Speaker
Dr. Violeta Calleja Solanas
Organisation
Department of Biology, Oxford University
Ask a complex systems’ researcher to draw an ecological network and you will likely get an interaction network: nodes are species, and links are who eats whom / who competes with whom / who pollinates whom, etc. But behind every ecological community hides a second network, the invasion graph. Each node is an entire community (a set of species able to persist together) and each directed link is an invasion: a newcomer species arrives, tries to establish, and sometimes extinguishes residents. Community assembly becomes a walk on this graph, and the graph’s structure records every history the community could have had.
In this talk, I will show how to build these graphs from generalised Lotka–Volterra dynamics and present the relationships between the structure of the invasion graph and the structure of the interaction networks among species.