Richard Levins has written some of my all-time favorite papers. In 1969, when he was at the University of Chicago, he studied a simple model for metapopulation (a population of populations) dynamics. The model shares the same for as the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model in epidemiology, and both can be turned in a model for a population growing logistically.

In a new paper, Zach and I study what happens in this type of models when a) many species are interacting in the landscape, and b) each species alters the patches it occupies, thereby changing the rate at which other species can colonize the patch when it is vacated. In essence, each empty patch retains a “memory” of the last occupant (habitat modification, or cross-immunity). You can read the paper here:

Zachary R. Miller and Stefano Allesina
Metapopulations with habitat modification
PNAS 118(49), 2021; (bioRXiv draft here)

For some background and a survey of the main mathematical difficulties in dealing with this kind of models, see this talk for the Theoretical Ecology Seminar Series: