Related papers: Effect of decreasing population growth-rate on def…
In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a…
Growth in the global human population this century will have momentous consequences for societies and the environment. Population growth has come with higher aggregate human welfare, but also climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on…
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…
Overpopulation and environmental degradation due to inadequate resource-use are outcomes of human's ecosystem engineering that has profoundly modified the world's landscape. Despite the age-old concern that unchecked population and economic…
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…
The probability of the survival of the population of individuals of both sexes of given mature age, procreation rate and structure stability has been searched in the numerical experiment. The populations with long period of reproduction and…
Forest-fire and avalanche models support the notion that frequent catastrophes prevent the growth of very large populations and as such prevent rare large-scale catastrophes. We show that this notion is not universal. A new model class…
We consider a simple-model population, whose individuals react with a certain delay to temporal variations of their habitat. We investigate the impact of such a delayed-answer on the survival chances of the population, both in a…
The population size has far-reaching effects on the fitness of the population, that, in its turn influences the population extinction or persistence. Understanding the density- and age-dependent factors will facilitate more accurate…
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…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability 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…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…
Concerns about declining or ageing populations often centre on the fear that fewer people will translate to a weaker economy and lower living standards. But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of…
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…
Environmental fluctuations can create population-depleted areas and even extinct areas for the population. This effect is more severe in the presence of the Allee effect (decreasing growth rate at low population densities). Dispersal inside…
Biologists have found that the death rate of cells in culture depends upon their spatial density. Permanent "Stay alive" signals from their neighbours seem to prevent them from dying. In a previous paper (Wang et al. 2013) we gave evidence…
A demographic Allee effect occurs when individual fitness, at low densities, increases with population density. Coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates, Allee effects can have subtle effects on population persistence…
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…