Related papers: Optimal Investment to Enable Evolutionary Rescue
It is well known that excessive harvesting or hunting has driven species to extinction both on local and global scales. This leads to one of the fundamental problems of conservation ecology: how should we harvest a population so that…
Evolutionary Robotics offers the possibility to design robots to solve a specific task automatically by optimizing their morphology and control together. However, this co-optimization of body and control is challenging, because controllers…
Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…
Stabilizing the dynamics of complex, non-linear systems is a major concern across several scientific disciplines including ecology and conservation biology. Unfortunately, most methods proposed to reduce the fluctuations in chaotic systems…
Ecological systems are dynamic and policies to manage them need to respond to that variation. However, policy adjustments will sometimes be costly, which means that fine-tuning a policy to track variability in the environment very tightly…
Species augmentation is one of the methods used to promote biodiversity and prevent endangered species loss and extinction. The current work applies discrete-time optimal control theory to two models of species augmentation for…
We study a generic reaction-diffusion model for single-species population dynamics that includes reproduction, death, and competition. The population is assumed to be confined in a refuge beyond which conditions are so harsh that they lead…
Despite great interest in techniques for stabilizing the dynamics of biological populations and metapopulations, very few practicable methods have been developed. We propose an easily implementable method, Adaptive Limiter Control (ALC),…
Protecting endangered species has been an important issue in ecology. We derive a reaction-diffusion model for a population in a one-dimensional bounded habitat, where the population is subjected to a strong Allee effect in its natural…
The tragedy of the commons has traditionally been framed as a problem of resource overuse driven by self-interested exploitation. In contrast, growing empirical evidence shows that insufficient use or abandonment of natural resources, known…
We propose a system theoretic approach to select and stabilize the endemic equilibrium of an SIRS epidemic model in which the decisions of a population of strategically interacting agents determine the transmission rate. Specifically, the…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
A deterministic population dynamics model involving birth and death for a two-species system, comprising a wild-type and more resistant species competing via logistic growth, is subjected to two distinct stress environments designed to…
Humans are the ultimate ecosystem engineers who have profoundly transformed the world's landscapes in order to enhance their survival. Somewhat paradoxically, however, sometimes the unforeseen effect of this ecosystem engineering is the…
We show that evolution in a population of adaptive agents, repeatedly competing for a limited resource, can come to an abrupt halt. This transition from evolutionary to non-evolutionary behavior arises as the global resource level is…
The search ability of an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) depends on the variation among the individuals in the population [3, 4, 8]. Maintaining an optimal level of diversity in the EA population is imperative to ensure that progress of the EA…
The paper is concerned with a class of optimization problems for moving sets $t\mapsto\Omega(t)\subset\mathbb{R}^2$, motivated by the control of invasive biological populations. Assuming that the initial contaminated set $\Omega_0$ is…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
We analyze the long-term stability of a stochastic model designed to illustrate the adaptation of a population to variation in its environment. A piecewise-deterministic process modeling adaptation is coupled to a Feller logistic diffusion…
Many populations in nature are fragmented: they consist of local populations occupying separate patches. A local population is prone to extinction due to the shot noise of birth and death processes. A migrating population from another patch…