Preliminaries

Goals

  • Brief overview of the history of the study of ecological assembly
  • List the main issues that make the development of a theory of assembly difficult
  • Make assumptions that remove the main obstacles
  • Study top-down assembly, and show that in this way any endpoint of assembly is reachable
  • Study bottom-up assembly, and the notion of an assembly graph
  • Prove equivalence between bottom-up and top-down assembly for certain Lotka-Volterra models
  • Outline next steps in the development of a theory of assembly

Computing

All the figures are generated at runtime, using R code that can be found in this GitHub repository. Please make sure that the following libraries are installed:

  • deSolve for integration of differential equations
  • tidyverse for data manipulation and plotting
  • knitr to compile this document
  • igraph for visualizing networks

Questions and answers

If you have a question that prevents you from following the lecture, please unmute yourself and ask the question—other students are likely to have the same problem! If you are asking a question out of curiosity, or that can be discussed later, please put it in the chat. I will keep the last few minutes of each lecture for Q&A.