Related papers: Evolution of unconditional dispersal in periodic e…
We adapt a fitness function from evolutionary game theory as a mechanism for aggregation and dispersal in a partial differential equation (PDE) model of two interacting populations, described by density functions $u$ and $v$. We consider a…
The dynamics of dispersal-structured populations, consisting of competing individuals that are characterized by different diffusion coefficients but are otherwise identical, is investigated. Competition is taken into account through…
Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a key concept in evolutionary game theory. ESS provides an evolutionary stability criterion for biological, social and economical behaviors. In this paper, we develop a new approach to evaluate ESS in…
Cyclic dominance between species may yield spiral waves that are known to provide a mechanism enabling persistent species coexistence. This observation holds true even in presence of spatial heterogeneity in the form of quenched disorder.…
Organisms that grow and survive in uncertain environments may need to change their physiological state as the environment changes. When the environment is uncertain, one strategy known as bet-hedging is to make these changes randomly and…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
The spreading of evolutionary novelties across populations is the central element of adaptation. Unless population are well-mixed (like bacteria in a shaken test tube), the spreading dynamics not only depends on fitness differences but also…
Aggregation-diffusion equations are foundational tools for modelling biological aggregations. Their principal use is to link the collective movement mechanisms of organisms to their emergent space use patterns in a concrete mathematical…
Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to…
The dynamics of a population expanding into unoccupied habitat has been primarily studied for situations in which growth and dispersal parameters are uniform in space or vary in one dimension. Here we study the influence of finite-sized…
Biological organisms have to cope with stochastic variations in both the external environment and the internal population dynamics. Theoretical studies and laboratory experiments suggest that population diversification could be an effective…
Environmental variations can significantly influence how populations compete for resources, and hence shape their evolution. Here, we study population dynamics subject to a fluctuating environment modeled by a varying carrying capacity…
We consider an asexual population under strong selection-weak mutation conditions evolving on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. Unlike the previous studies in which the initial fitness of the population is assumed to…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…