Related papers: Bet-hedging against demographic fluctuations
We consider stochastic growth models to represent population subject to catastrophes. We analyze the subject from different set ups considering or not spatial restrictions, whether dispersion is a good strategy to increase the population…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
The spatio-temporal dynamics of a population present one of the most fascinating aspects and challenges for ecological modelling. In this article we review some simple mathematical models, based on one dimensional…
Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…
Organisms that exploit different environments may experience a stochastic delay in adjusting their fitness when they switch habitats. We study two species whose fitness is determined by the species composition of the local environment, as…
We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…
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…
The storage effect is a well-known explanation for coexistence in temporally varying environments. Like many complex ecological theories, the storage effect is often used as an explanation for observed coexistence on the basis of heuristic…
Fluctuating environments pose tremendous challenges to bacterial populations. It is observed in numerous bacterial species that individual cells can stochastically switch among multiple phenotypes for the population to survive in rapidly…
Existing theoretical models of evolution focus on the relative fitness advantages of different mutants in a population while the dynamic behavior of the population size is mostly left unconsidered. We here present a generic stochastic model…
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
Evolutionary algorithms have been successfully applied to a variety of optimisation problems in stationary environments. However, many real world optimisation problems are set in dynamic environments where the success criteria shifts…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Many biological systems regulate phenotypic heterogeneity as a fitness-maximising strategy in uncertain and dynamic environments. Analysis of such strategies is typically confined both to a discrete set of environmental conditions, and to a…
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…
We study the interplay of population growth and evolutionary dynamics using a stochastic model based on birth and death events. In contrast to the common assumption of an independent population size, evolution can be strongly affected by…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
Frequency-dependent selection reflects the interaction between different species as they battle for limited resources in their environment. In a stochastic evolutionary game the species relative fitnesses guides the evolutionary dynamics…