Related papers: Slow expanders invade by forming dented fronts in …
Certain invasive plants may rely on interference mechanisms (allelopathy, e.g.) to gain competitive superiority over native species. But expending resources on interference presumably exacts a cost in another life-history trait, so that the…
Sea urchin feeding fronts are a striking example of spatial pattern formation in an ecological system. If it is assumed that urchins are asocial, and that they move randomly, then the formation of these dense fronts is an apparent paradox.…
Dispersal of species to find a more favorable habitat is important in population dynamics. Dispersal rates evolve in response to the relative success of different dispersal strategies. In a simplified deterministic treatment (J. Dockery, V.…
We study a class of minimal geometric partial differential equations that serves as a framework to understand the evolution of boundaries between states in different pattern forming systems. The framework combines normal growth, curvature…
In a geographically distributed population, assortative clustering plays an important role in evolution by modifying local environments. To examine its effects in a linear habitat, we consider a one-dimensional grid of cells, where each…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
Cancer cells are known to modify their micro-environment such that it can sustain a larger population, or, in ecological terms, they construct a niche which increases the carrying capacity of the population. It has however been argued that…
Cellular populations such as avascular tumors and microbial biofilms may "invade" or grow into surrounding populations. The invading population is often comprised of a heterogeneous mixture of cells with varying growth rates. The population…
Organisms may respond to local stimuli that benefit or threaten their fitness. The adaptive movement behaviour may allow individuals to adjust their speed to maximise the chances of being in comfort zones, where death risk is minimal. We…
We live in a time where climate models predict future increases in environmental variability and biological invasions are becoming increasingly frequent. A key to developing effective responses to biological invasions in increasingly…
Organisms often grow, migrate and compete in liquid environments, as well as on solid surfaces. However, relatively little is known about what happens when competing species are mixed and compressed by fluid turbulence. In these lectures we…
Predicting the outcomes of species invasions is a central goal of ecology, a task made especially challenging due to ecological feedbacks. To address this, we develop a general theory of ecological invasions applicable to a wide variety of…
Regular vegetation patterns in semiarid ecosystems are believed to arise from the interplay between long-range competition and facilitation processes acting at smaller distances. We show that, under rather general conditions, long-range…
Analyzing the mixing time of random walks is a well-studied problem with applications in random sampling and more recently in graph partitioning. In this work, we present new analysis of random walks and evolving sets using more…
This is supplementary information for arXiv:1204.4896, which also appeared in Physical Biology 9, 026008 (2012). Main text abstract: Evolutionary experiments with microbes are a powerful tool to study mutations and natural selection. These…
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…
A key question in evolution is how likely a mutant is to take over. This depends on natural selection and on stochastic fluctuations. Population spatial structure can impact mutant fixation probabilities. We introduce a model for structured…
In this article we investigate two free boundary problems for a Lotka-Volterra competition system in a higher space dimension with sign-changing coefficients. One may be viewed as describing how two competing species invade if they occupy…
We propose two models of the evolution of a pair of competing populations. Both are lattice based. The first is a compromise between fully spatial models, which do not appear amenable to analytic results, and interacting particle system…
Does a high dispersal rate provide a competitive advantage when risking competitive exclusion? To this day, the theoretical literature cannot answer this question in full generality. The present paper focuses on the simplest mathematical…