Related papers: Noise-induced excitability: bloom, bust and extirp…
Theoretical ecologists have long sought to understand how the persistence of populations depends on biotic and abiotic factors. Classical work showed that demographic stochasticity causes the mean time to extinction to increase…
Conventional wisdom suggests that environmental noise drives populations toward extinction. In contrast, we report a paradoxical phenomenon in which stochasticity reverses a deterministic tipping point, thereby preventing collapse. Using a…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
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 processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is…
We present an explicit unified stochastic model of fluctuations in population size due to random birth, death, density-dependent competition and environmental fluctuations. Stochastic dynamics provide insight into small populations,…
We investigate extinction of a long-lived self-regulating stochastic population, caused by intrinsic (demographic) noise. Extinction typically occurs via one of two scenarios depending on whether the absorbing state n=0 is a repelling…
Recently, a first step was made by the authors towards a systematic investigation of the effect of reaction-step-size noise - uncertainty in the step size of the reaction - on the dynamics of stochastic populations. This was done by…
Populations of competing biological species exhibit a fascinating interplay between the nonlinear dynamics of evolutionary selection forces and random fluctuations arising from the stochastic nature of the interactions. The processes…
Strong positive feedback is considered a necessary condition to observe abrupt shifts of ecosystems. A few previous studies have shown that demographic noise -- arising from the probabilistic and discrete nature of birth and death processes…
Understanding the mechanisms governing population extinctions is of key importance to many problems in ecology and evolution. Stochastic factors are known to play a central role in extinction, but the interactions between a population's…
We introduce an individual-based model of a complex ecological community with random interactions. The model contains a large number of species, each with a finite population of individuals, subject to discrete reproduction and death…
Environmental noise can cause an exponential reduction in the mean time to extinction (MTE) of an isolated population. We study this effect on an example of a stochastic birth-death process with rates modulated by a colored Gaussian noise.…
We consider a stochastic population model where the intrinsic or demographic noise causes cycling between states before the population eventually goes extinct. A master equation approach coupled with a WKB (Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin)…
This paper explores a stochastic Gause predator-prey model with bounded or sub-linear functional response. The model, described by a system of stochastic differential equations, captures the influence of stochastic fluctuations on…
Noise, through its interaction with the nonlinearity of the living systems, can give rise to counter-intuitive phenomena such as stochastic resonance, noise-delayed extinction, temporal oscillations, and spatial patterns. In this paper we…
Microbial populations in the natural environment are likely to experience growth conditions very different from those of a typical laboratory xperiment. In particular, removal rates of biomass and substrate are unlikely to be balanced under…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Population dynamics reflects an underlying birth-death process, where the rates associated with different events may depend on external environmental conditions and on the population density. A whole family of simple and popular…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…