Related papers: Dispersion as a survival strategy

Source-sink systems are metapopulations of patches that can be of variable habitat quality. They can be seen as graphs, where vertices represent the patches, and the weighted oriented edges give the probability of dispersal from one patch…

Many species are unsustainable at small population densities (Allee Effect), i.e., below a threshold named Allee threshold, the population decreases instead of growing. In a closed local population, environmental fluctuations always lead to…

In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…

We consider a version of large population games whose players compete for resources using strategies with adaptable preferences. The system efficiency is measured by the variance of the decisions. In the regime where the system can be…

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…

Understanding if and how mutants reach fixation in populations is an important question in evolutionary biology. We study the impact of population growth has on the success of mutants. To systematically understand the effects of growth we…

This paper investigates the optimal harvesting strategy for a single species living in random environments whose growth is given by a regime-switching diffusion. Harvesting acts as a (stochastic) control on the size of the population. The…

Natural selection and random drift are competing phenomena for explaining the evolution of populations. Combining a highly fit mutant with a population structure that improves the odds that the mutant spreads through the whole population…

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…

Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…

We consider populations structured by a phenotypic trait and a space variable, in a non-homogeneous environment. In the case of sex- ual populations, we are able to derive models close to existing mod- els in theoretical biology, from a…

This paper considers some designs for sampling and interventions in dynamic networks and spatial temporal settings. The sample spreads through the population largely by tracing network links, although random sampling or spatial designs may…

We consider a class of biologically-motivated stochastic processes in which a unicellular organism divides its resources (volume or damaged proteins, in particular) symmetrically or asymmetrically between its progeny. Assuming the final…

A central problem in population ecology is understanding the consequences of stochastic fluctuations. Analytically tractable models with Gaussian driving noise have led to important, general insights, but they fail to capture rare,…

We consider a reaction-diffusion model for a population structured in phenotype. We assume that the population lives in a heterogeneous periodic environment, so that a given phenotypic trait may be more or less fit according to the spatial…

Populations are made up of an integer number of individuals and are subject to stochastic birth-death processes whose rates may vary in time. Useful quantities, like the chance of ultimate fixation, satisfy an appropriate difference…

Stochastic modeling of disease dynamics has had a long tradition. Among the first epidemic models including a spatial structure in the form of local interactions is the contact process. In this article we investigate two extensions of the…

Distribution shifts have long been regarded as troublesome external forces that a decision-maker should either counteract or conform to. An intriguing feedback phenomenon termed decision dependence arises when the deployed decision affects…

Understanding under what conditions populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, persist is an issue of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and environmental fluctuations…

Levels of sociality in nature vary widely. Some species are solitary; others live in family groups; some form complex multi-family societies. Increased levels of social interaction can allow for the spread of useful innovations and…