In a new paper, Jacopo, Gyuri and I studied the persistence of metapopulations living in a landscape where patches of suitable habitat are scattered randomly.

We found strong connections between metapopulation theory, the mathematics of Random Geometric Graphs, and the physics of disordered systems. You can find the paper here:

Jacopo Grilli, György Barabás, Stefano Allesina
Metapopulation Persistence in Random Fragmented Landscapes
PLoS Computational Biology, 2015

A bit on the backstory: in December 2014, I gave a talk at UC Davis, and, at dinner, Sebastian Schreiber mentioned that if I liked problems involving eigenvalues I should have looked at the classic Hanski & Ovaskainen model. Back in Chicago, Gyuri (who had just started his postdoc) and Jacopo (who was visiting from Italy) thought it would be a good project to jumpstart our collaboration…