Related papers: The collapse of ecosystem engineer populations
We investigate the evolutionary rescue of a microbial population in a gradually deteriorating environment, through a combination of analytical calculations and stochastic simulations. We consider a population destined for extinction in the…
Biodiversity widely observed in ecological systems is attributed to the dynamical balance among the competing species. The time-varying populations of the interacting species are often captured rather well by a set of deterministic…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Spatial metapopulation models are fundamental to theoretical ecology, enabling to study how landscape structure influences global species dynamics. Traditional models, including recent generalizations, often rely on the deterministic limit…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
In both natural and artificial studies, evolution is often seen as synonymous to natural selection. Individuals evolve under pressures set by environments that are either reset or do not carry over significant changes from previous…
Mounting evidence indicates that our planet might experience runaway effects associated to rising temperatures and ecosystem overexploitation, leading to catastrophic shifts on short time scales. Remediation scenarios capable of…
Ecological resilience refers to the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations or parameter changes. While understanding and quantifying resilience is crucial to anticipate the possible regime…
We consider the dynamics of a population spatially structured in colonies that are vulnerable to catastrophic events occurring at random times, which randomly reduce their population size and compel survivors to disperse to neighboring…
We examine the switching dynamics of a stochastic population subjected to a deterministically time-varying environment. Our approach is demonstrated in the realm of ecology on a problem of population establishment. Here, by assuming a…
In the past decades human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby…
Evolutionary games are a developing sub-field of game theory. This branch of game theory is used in the study of the adaptation of large, but finite, populations of agents to changes in the environment. It assumes that each agent has no…
We study the effect of random perturbations in the Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model. HANDY models the interactions between human population, depletion, and consumption of natural resources. HANDY explains how endogenous human--nature…
Consider a population whose size changes stepwise by its members reproducing or dying (disappearing), but is otherwise quite general. Denote the initial (non-random) size by $Z_0$ and the size of the $n$th change by $C_n$, $n= 1, 2,…
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…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
We consider the system of reaction-diffusion equations proposed in [8] as a population dynamics model. The first equation stands for the population density and models the ecological effects, namely dispersion and growth with a Allee effect…
Critical transitions or regime shifts are sudden and unexpected changes in the state of an ecosystem, that are usually associated with dangerous levels of environmental change. However, recent studies show that critical transitions can also…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
The main topic of this thesis is the analysis of evolution equations reflecting issues in ecology and population dynamics. In mathematical modelling, the impact of environmental elements and the interaction between species is read into the…