Related papers: Dispersal-induced resilience to stochastic environ…
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…
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…
Habitat loss, driven primarily by anthropogenic activity, significantly threatens ecosystem sustainability. While it is well understood that habitat loss is the leading contributor to declines in biodiversity worldwide, the connection…
We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…
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…
How should dispersal strategies be chosen to increase the likelihood of survival of a species? We obtain the answer for the spatially extended versions of three well-known models of two competing species with unequal diffusivities. Though…
Consumers face numerous risks that can be minimized by incorporating different life-history strategies. How much and when a consumer adds to its energetic reserves or invests in reproduction are key behavioral and physiological adaptations…
Species growing in environments that change in time and space will vary in their abundance across locations, even in the absence of persistent location preferences. Here we quantify this non-equilibrium effect by studying a minimal model of…
We introduce a spatial stochastic process on the lattice Z^d to model mass extinctions. Each site of the lattice may host a flock of up to N individuals. Each individual may give birth to a new individual at the same site at rate \phi until…
The population dynamics of predator-prey systems in the presence of patch-specific predators are explored in a setting where the prey population has access to both habitats. The emphasis is in situations where patch-prey abundance drives…
The dynamics of a reaction-diffusion-advection benthic-drift population model that links changes in the flow regime and habitat availability with population dynamics is studied. In the model, the stream is divided into drift zone and…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
Theory predicts rapid genetic drift during invasions, yet many expanding populations maintain high genetic diversity. We find that genetic drift is dramatically suppressed when dispersal rates increase with the population density because…
Unraveling patterns of animals' movements is important for understanding the fundamental basics of biogeography, tracking range shifts resulting from climate change, predicting and preventing biological invansions. Many researchers have…
There is a pressing need to better understand how microbial populations respond to antimicrobial drugs, and to find mechanisms to possibly eradicate antimicrobial-resistant cells. The inactivation of antimicrobials by resistant microbes can…
The dynamics of species' densities depend both on internal and external variables. Internal variables include frequencies of individuals exhibiting different phenotypes or living in different spatial locations. External variables include…
We consider a population distributed between two habitats, in each of which it experiences a growth rate that switches periodically between two values, $1- \varepsilon > 0$ or $ - (1 + \varepsilon) < 0$. We study the specific case where the…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
This work is devoted to studying the dynamics of a structured population that is subject to the combined effects of environmental stochasticity, competition for resources, spatio-temporal heterogeneity and dispersal. The population is…
We present a new model for extinction in which species evolve in bursts or `avalanches', during which they become on average more susceptible to environmental stresses such as harsh climates and so are more easily rendered extinct. Results…