Related papers: Regularity underlies erratic population abundances…
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…
In this kind of model, the main characteristic that determines population viability in the long term is the stochastic growth rate (SGR) denoted $\lambda_S$. When $\lambda_S$ is larger than one, the population grows exponentially with…
The behavior of interacting populations typically displays irregular temporal and spatial patterns that are difficult to reconcile with an underlying deterministic dynamics. A classical example is the heterogeneous distribution of plankton…
Diverse communities of competing species are generally characterized by substantial niche overlap and strongly stochastic dynamics. Abundance fluctuations are proportional to population size, so the dynamics of rare populations is slower.…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Demographic stochasticity is important in determining extinction risks of small populations, but it is largely unknown how its effect depends on the life histories of species. We modeled effects of demographic stochasticity on extinction…
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…
Finite-size fluctuations arising in the dynamics of competing populations may have dramatic influence on their fate. As an example, in this article, we investigate a model of three species which dominate each other in a cyclic manner.…
In contrast to the neutral population cycles of the deterministic mean-field Lotka--Volterra rate equations, including spatial structure and stochastic noise in models for predator-prey interactions yields complex spatio-temporal structures…
This work is devoted to studying the dynamics of a structured population that is subject to the combined effects of environmental stochasticity, competition for resources, spatio-temporal heterogeneity and dispersal. The population is…
The composition of ecological communities varies not only between different locations but also in time. Understanding the fundamental processes that drive species towards rarity or abundance is crucial to assessing ecosystem resilience and…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
Extinction of a long-lived isolated stochastic population can be described as an exponentially slow decay of quasi-stationary probability distribution of the population size. We address extinction of a population in a two-population system…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…
Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
A striking feature of the marine ecosystem is the regularity in its size spectrum: the abundance of organisms as a function of their weight approximately follows a power law over almost ten orders of magnitude. We interpret this as evidence…
We look at the interaction of dispersal and environmental stochasticity in $n$-patch models. We are able to prove persistence and extinction results even in the setting when the dispersal rates are stochastic. As applications we look at…