ICTP-ICTS Winter School on Quantitative Systems Biology

One important interdisciplinary approach of ecological systems is the "complexity" perspective, which is represented by many lectures in this school. This lecture covers complementary ideas about networks of species interactions, their structures, and the use of randomness to understand their general features.

This session will be mostly practical. Within the framework of the 2-species LV model, we will use nullcline analysis to predict the outcome of competition in different situations. These include cases in which either or both competitors are subject to cooperative growth, which can lead to alternative stable states that emerge in (2-species) co-culture, but that are absent in any of the (1-species) monocultures.

This class is an introduction to the 2-species competitive Lotka-Volterra model. We will cover three canonical outcomes--coexistence, dominance and bistability-- for the pairwise competition between species. We will also use the model to predict co-culture's responses to different perturbations, and see how these predictions were experimentally verified in microcosms.

In this class, we will cover basic ecological models on population growth dynamics and saturation, including logistic growth and the Allee effect (cooperative growth). We will see how these models can capture the dynamics of microbial populations, which in turn are convenient experimental models to test hypotheses from ecological theory.