Related papers: A Quasispecies on a Moving Oasis
Identifying early warning signs of sudden population changes and mechanisms leading to regime shifts are highly desirable in population biology. In this paper, a two-trophic ecosystem comprising of two species of predators, competing for…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
In both natural and artificial studies, evolution is often seen as synonymous to natural selection. Individuals evolve under pressures set by environments that are either reset or do not carry over significant changes from previous…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
A central goal in ecology is to understand how biodiversity is maintained. Previous theoretical works have employed the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game as a toy model, demonstrating that population mobility is crucial in determining the…
We study self-replicating molecules under externally varying conditions. Changing conditions such as temperature variations and/or alterations in the environment's resource composition lead to both non-constant replication and decay rates…
In an adaptive population which models financial markets and distributed control, we consider how the dynamics depends on the diversity of the agents' initial preferences of strategies. When the diversity decreases, more agents tend to…
In this paper we study the long term dynamics of two prey species and one predator species. In the deterministic setting, if we assume the interactions are of Lotka-Volterra type (competition or predation), the long term behavior of this…
Population boundary is a classic indicator of climatic response in ecology. In addition to known challenges, the spatial and dynamical characteristics of the boundary are not only affected by the spatial gradient in the environmental…
Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms as it helps with global exploration and facilitates the use of crossover. Despite many runtime analyses showing advantages of population diversity, we have no clear picture of how…
We study a minimal model for the growth of a phenotypically heterogeneous population of cells subject to a fluctuating environment in which they can replicate (by exploiting available resources) and modify their phenotype within a given…
The process of desertification is usually modeled as a first order transition, where a change of an external parameter (e.g. precipitation) leads to a catastrophic bifurcation followed by an ecological regime shift. However, vegetation…
We develop a mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic predator-prey ecosystem composed of two herbivores in asymmetrical competition and a hunter exerting a predatory pressure on both species. With the aim of…
We study a stochastic differential equation driven by a Poisson point process, which models continuous changes in a population's environment, as well as the stochastic fixation of beneficial mutations that might compensate for this change.…
Over the past century, nonlinear difference and differential equations have been used to understand conditions for species coexistence. However, these models fail to account for random fluctuations due to demographic and environmental…
We explore some aspects of the relationship between biological evolution processes and the mathematical theory of records. For Eigen's quasispecies model with an uncorrelated fitness landscape, we show that the evolutionary trajectories…
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.…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
We consider a population structured by a spacevariable and a phenotypical trait, submitted to dispersion,mutations, growth and nonlocal competition. This population is facing an {\it environmental gradient}: to survive at location $x$, an…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…