Related papers: WKB versus generalized van Kampen system-size expa…
We consider excursions for a class of stochastic processes describing a population of discrete individuals experiencing density-limited growth, such that the population has a finite carrying capacity and behaves qualitatively like the…
1 Sharp prediction of extinction times is needed in biodiversity monitoring and conservation management. 2 The Galton-Watson process is a classical stochastic model for describing population dynamics. Its evolution is like the matrix…
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…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
Biodiversity and extinction are central issues in evolution. Dynamical balance among different species in ecosystems is often described by deterministic replicator equations with moderate success. However, fluctuations are inevitable,…
In numerous papers, the behaviour of stochastic population models is investigated through the sign of a real quantity which is the growth rate of the population near the extinction set. In many cases, it is proven that when this growth rate…
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…
The survival of natural populations may be greatly affected by environmental conditions that vary in space and time. We look at a population residing in two locations (patches) coupled by migration, in which the local conditions fluctuate…
Building upon the eco-evolutionary game dynamics framework established by Tilman et al., we investigate stochastic fluctuations in a two-strategy system incorporating environmental feedback mechanisms, where the payoff matrix exhibits…
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…
One of the most striking effect of fluctuations in evolutionary game theory is the possibility for mutants to fixate (take over) an entire population. Here, we generalize a recent WKB-based theory to study fixation in evolutionary games…
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 paper we consider the global qualitative properties of a stochastically perturbed logistic model of population growth. In this model, the stochastic perturbations are assumed to be of the white noise type and are proportional to the…
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…
Fluctuations and noise may alter the behavior of dynamical systems considerably. For example, oscillations may be sustained by demographic fluctuations in biological systems where a stable fixed point is found in the absence of noise. We…
Spatially extended population dynamics models that incorporate intrinsic noise serve as case studies for the role of fluctuations and correlations in biological systems. Including spatial structure and stochastic noise in predator-prey…
Two mathematical models of macroevolution are studied. These models have population dynamics at the species level, and mutations and extinction of species are also included. The population dynamics are updated by difference equations with…
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…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
The well known van Kampen system size expansion, while of rather general applicability, is shown to fail to reproduce some qualitative features of the time evolution for systems with an absorbing state, apart from a transient initial time…