Related papers: Optimal Investment to Enable Evolutionary Rescue
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…
Immigration can rescue local populations from extinction, helping to stabilise a metapopulation. Local population dynamics is important for determining the strength of this rescue effect, but the mechanistic link between local demographic…
Real-world optimisation problems are often dynamic. Previously good solutions must be updated or replaced due to changes in objectives and constraints. It is often claimed that evolutionary algorithms are particularly suitable for dynamic…
We study a dynamical model of a population of cooperators and defectors whose actions have long-term consequences on environmental "commons" - what we term the "resource". Cooperators contribute to restoring the resource whereas defectors…
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,…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
Phenotypic plasticity and its evolution may help evolutionary rescue in a novel and stressful environment, especially if environmental novelty reveals cryptic genetic variation that enables the evolution of increased plasticity. However,…
Evolutionary changes impacts interactions among populations and can disrupt ecosystems by driving extinctions or by collapsing population oscillations, posing significant challenges to biodiversity conservation. This study addresses the…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in population fitness are punctuated by sudden innovations, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We use a recent quantitative mathematical analysis of…
The fitness of a biological strategy is typically measured by its expected reproductive rate, the first moment of its offspring distribution. However, strategies with high expected rates can also have high probabilities of extinction. A…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…
We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
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…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
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…
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…
An impulsive model of augmentative biological control consisting of a general continuous predator-prey model in ordinary differential equations augmented by a discrete part describing periodic introductions of predators is considered. It is…
The optimization of dynamic problems is both widespread and difficult. When conducting dynamic optimization, a balance between reinitialization and computational expense has to be found. There are multiple approaches to this. In parallel…
Evolution Strategies are inspired in biology and part of a larger research field known as Evolutionary Algorithms. Those strategies perform a random search in the space of admissible functions, aiming to optimize some given objective…