Related papers: Converging towards the optimal path to extinction
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…
Understanding the mechanisms governing population extinctions is of key importance to many problems in ecology and evolution. Stochastic factors are known to play a central role in extinction, but the interactions between a population's…
Stochastic chemical reaction or population dynamics in finite systems often terminates in an absorbing state. Yet in large spatially extended systems, the time to reach species extinction (or fixation) becomes exceedingly long. Tuning…
Extinction is the ultimate absorbing state of any stochastic birth-death process, hence the time to extinction is an important characteristic of any natural population. Here we consider logistic and logistic-like systems under the combined…
Macroscopic fluctuations have become an essential tool to understand physics far from equilibrium due to the link between their statistics and nonequilibrium ensembles. The optimal path leading to a fluctuation encodes key information on…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
Motivated by modeling the dynamics of a population living in a flowing medium where the environmental factors are random in space, we have studied an asymmetric variant of the one-dimensional contact process, where the quenched random…
Population dynamics reflects an underlying birth-death process, where the rates associated with different events may depend on external environmental conditions and on the population density. A whole family of simple and popular…
We consider a random walk with death in $[-N,N]$ moving in a time dependent environment. The environment is a system of particles which describes a current flux from $N$ to $-N$. Its evolution is influenced by the presence of the random…
Systems that evolve towards a state from which they cannot depart are common in nature. But the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, a fundamental result in statistical mechanics, is mainly restricted to systems near-stationarity. In processes…
We study the stochastic evolution of four species in cyclic competition in a well mixed environment. In systems composed of a finite number $N$ of particles these simple interaction rules result in a rich variety of extinction scenarios,…
Populations are often subject to catastrophes that cause mass removal of individuals. Many stochastic growth models have been considered to explain such dynamics. Among the results reported, it has been considered whether dispersion…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Deterministic evolutionary game dynamics can lead to stable coexistences of different types. Stochasticity, however, drives the loss of such coexistences. This extinction is usually accompanied by population size fluctuations. We…
We consider optimal vaccination protocol where the vaccine is in short supply. In this case, disease extinction results from a large and rare fluctuation. We show that the probability of such fluctuation can be exponentially increased by…