File:Schematic representation of the simulation framework.png

English: "The scheme refers to a single pair of control versus invasion simulations. The two sets of contiguous squares at the top of the panel represent different, subsequent snapshots of digital communities. Free-living organisms (digital hosts) are represented as small, coloured squares, while pathogens are represented as coloured circles. Different colours correspond to different species emerging throughout the evolutionary progression of the simulations. Each pair started with the same seed from a single ancestral digital host (a), with a small population of digital pathogens being injected in both communities at the same moment and in the same locations. Therefore, the control and invasion communities evolved in the same way until the moment when we injected a population of time-travelling pathogens sampled from one of the community snapshots (b) into one future community (c) of the invasion time series. From that moment onward, the communities started to diverge (illustrated in the lower panel, with diversity change as an example metric). We let the two simulations run for 250,000 updates, and then we explored the potential effect of time-travelling invaders on the invaded communities by comparing the different trajectories of diversity and complexity (green versus purple line in the lower panel). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011268.g001"