Related papers: Demographic noise and resilience in a semi-arid ec…
Strong positive feedback is considered a necessary condition to observe abrupt shifts of ecosystems. A few previous studies have shown that demographic noise -- arising from the probabilistic and discrete nature of birth and death processes…
Vegetation in semi-arid ecosystems frequently organizes into spatially heterogeneous mosaics that regulate ecosystem functioning, productivity, and resilience. These patterns arise from local biological interactions, including facilitation…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental noise drives populations toward extinction. In contrast, we report a paradoxical phenomenon in which stochasticity reverses a deterministic tipping point, thereby preventing collapse. Using a…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Recreational fishing is a highly socio-ecological process. Although recreational fisheries are self-regulating and resilient, changing anthropogenic pressure drives these fisheries to overharvest and collapse. Here, we evaluate the effect…
We explore a class of hybrid (piecewise deterministic) systems characterized by a large number of individuals inhabiting an environment whose state is described by a set of continuous variables. We use analytical and numerical methods from…
We study how environmental stochasticity influences the long-term population size in certain one- and two-species models. The difficulty is that even when one can prove that there is persistence, it is usually impossible to say anything…
Water availability is a major environmental driver affecting riparian and wetland vegetation. The interaction between water table fluctuations and vegetation in a stochastic environment contributes to the complexity of the dynamics of these…
Understanding the causes and effects of spatial aggregation is one of the most fundamental problems in ecology. Aggregation is an emergent phenomenon arising from the interactions between the individuals of the population, able to sense…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
Evolutionary game theory has traditionally employed deterministic models to describe population dynamics. These models, due to their inherent nonlinearities, can exhibit deterministic chaos, where population fluctuations follow complex,…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
We propose a model equation for the dynamics of tree density in mesic savannas. It considers long-range competition among trees and the effect of fire acting as a local facilitation mechanism. Despite short-range facilitation is taken to…
When a collection of phenotypically diverse organisms compete with each other for limited resources, with competition being strongest amongst the most similar, the population can evolve into tightly localised clusters. This process can be…
We study the effects of demographic stochasticity on the long-term dynamics of biological coevolution models of community assembly. The noise is induced in order to check the validity of deterministic population dynamics. While mutualistic…
Dry-land ecosystem has turned into a matter of grave concern, due to growing threat of land degradation and bioproductivity-loss. Self-organized vegetation patterns are a remarkable characteristic of these ecosystems; apart from being…
Discrete time, spatially extended models play an important role in ecology, modelling population dynamics of species ranging from micro-organisms to birds. An important question is how 'bottom up', individual-based models can be…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…