Description
An annual survey of the q-bio.PE arXiv category, covering research published from September 2025 – August 2026. Built on a close-reading set of 120 papers and organised into 44 chapters, it maps the year by the field's research sub-directions.
Book framework (share of the year's output):
- Stochastic population dynamics and branching processes (15.7%) — This subdirection focuses on modeling population growth, extinction, and fixation times using stochastic processes and branching models with spatial structure and cooperative reproduction.
- Evolutionary fitness landscapes and adaptive dynamics (14.5%) — This subdirection investigates how fitness, selection, and mutation shape evolutionary trajectories across genetic, cultural, and artificial systems, including open-ended adaptation and landscape exploration.
- Data-driven epidemic forecasting and infectious disease modeling (12.6%) — This subdirection develops machine learning and statistical methods for forecasting infectious disease spread, integrating heterogeneous data sources and digital twin frameworks for public health applications.
- Ecological community dynamics and species interactions (11.6%) — This subdirection examines how competition, dispersal, and environmental heterogeneity structure ecological communities, including extinction thresholds, metacommunity dynamics, and spatial organization.
- Compartmental epidemic models and behavioral feedback (11.0%) — This subdirection extends classic SIR-type models with behavioral feedback, vaccination strategies, and statistical mechanics approaches to understand epidemic dynamics and control interventions.
- Evolutionary game theory and cooperation mechanisms (9.6%) — This subdirection explores how reciprocity, punishment, and spatial structure stabilize cooperation in social dilemmas, using evolutionary game dynamics and reinforcement learning frameworks.
- Phylogenetic inference and tree space geometry (9.2%) — This subdirection develops algorithms and geometric methods for reconstructing and analyzing phylogenetic trees and networks, including hybrid models, graph neural networks, and spectral approaches.
- Vector-borne disease transmission and control (8.3%) — This subdirection models transmission dynamics of vector-borne diseases like dengue and Zika, incorporating spatial spread, vaccination, and economic-epidemiological trade-offs for control strategies.
- Tumor-immune dynamics and resistance evolution (4.3%) — This subdirection applies mathematical modeling to cancer therapy, bacterial resistance, and cell lineage dynamics, focusing on optimizing sequential treatments and understanding heterogeneity.
- Predator-prey systems and Allee effects (3.1%) — This subdirection studies predator-prey dynamics with Allee thresholds, stochastic disturbances, and multi-species interactions, including chaos, extinction risks, and ecological management implications.
Each sub-direction is covered across three chapters — how it framed its questions, the strength of its key findings, and its open debates and frontiers — so the reader gets a traceable picture of what this part of the field actually produced over the year.