4,560 research outputs found
Stochastic and deterministic models for age-structured populations with genetically variable traits
Understanding how stochastic and non-linear deterministic processes interact
is a major challenge in population dynamics theory. After a short review, we
introduce a stochastic individual-centered particle model to describe the
evolution in continuous time of a population with (continuous) age and trait
structures. The individuals reproduce asexually, age, interact and die. The
'trait' is an individual heritable property (d-dimensional vector) that may
influence birth and death rates and interactions between individuals, and vary
by mutation. In a large population limit, the random process converges to the
solution of a Gurtin-McCamy type PDE. We show that the random model has a long
time behavior that differs from its deterministic limit. However, the results
on the limiting PDE and large deviation techniques \textit{\`a la}
Freidlin-Wentzell provide estimates of the extinction time and a better
understanding of the long time behavior of the stochastic process. This has
applications to the theory of adaptive dynamics used in evolutionary biology.
We present simulations for two biological problems involving life-history trait
evolution when body size is plastic and individual growth is taken into
account.Comment: This work is a proceeding of the CANUM 2008 conferenc
Computational and mathematical modelling of plant species interactions in a harsh climate
This thesis will consider the following assumptions which are based on a few insights about the artic climate: (1)the artic climate can be characterised by a growing season called summer and a dormat season called winter (2)in the summer season growing conditions are reasonably favourable and species are more likely to compete for plentiful resources (3)in the winter season there would be no further growth and the plant populations would instead by subjected to fierce weather events such as storms which is more likely to lead to the destruction of some or all of the biomass. Under these assumptions, is it possible to find those change in the environment that might cause mutualism (see section 1.9.2) from competition (see section 1.9.1) to change? The primary aim of this thesis to to provide a prototype simulation of growth of two plant species in the artic that: (1)take account of different models for summer and winter seasons (2)permits the effects of changing climate to be seen on each type of plant species interaction
Some stochastic models for structured populations : scaling limits and long time behavior
The first chapter concerns monotype population models. We first study general
birth and death processes and we give non-explosion and extinction criteria,
moment computations and a pathwise representation. We then show how different
scales may lead to different qualitative approximations, either ODEs or SDEs.
The prototypes of these equations are the logistic (deterministic) equation and
the logistic Feller diffusion process. The convergence in law of the sequence
of processes is proved by tightness-uniqueness argument. In these large
population approximations, the competition between individuals leads to
nonlinear drift terms. We then focus on models without interaction but
including exceptional events due either to demographic stochasticity or to
environmental stochasticity. In the first case, an individual may have a large
number of offspring and we introduce the class of continuous state branching
processes. In the second case, catastrophes may occur and kill a random
fraction of the population and the process enjoys a quenched branching
property. We emphasize on the study of the Laplace transform, which allows us
to classify the long time behavior of these processes. In the second chapter,
we model structured populations by measure-valued stochastic differential
equations. Our approach is based on the individual dynamics. The individuals
are characterized by parameters which have an influence on their survival or
reproduction ability. Some of these parameters can be genetic and are
inheritable except when mutations occur, but they can also be a space location
or a quantity of parasites. The individuals compete for resources or other
environmental constraints. We describe the population by a point measure-valued
Markov process. We study macroscopic approximations of this process depending
on the interplay between different scalings and obtain in the limit either
integro-differential equations or reaction-diffusion equations or nonlinear
super-processes. In each case, we insist on the specific techniques for the
proof of convergence and for the study of the limiting model. The limiting
processes offer different models of mutation-selection dynamics. Then, we study
two-level models motivated by cell division dynamics, where the cell population
is discrete and characterized by a trait, which may be continuous. In 1
particular, we finely study a process for parasite infection and the trait is
the parasite load. The latter grows following a Feller diffusion and is
randomly shared in the two daughter cells when the cell divides. Finally, we
focus on the neutral case when the rate of division of cells is constant but
the trait evolves following a general Markov process and may split in a random
number of cells. The long time behavior of the structured population is then
linked and derived from the behavior a well chosen SDE (monotype population)
Sustaining Economic Exploitation of Complex Ecosystems in Computational Models of Coupled Human-Natural Networks
Understanding ecological complexity has stymied scientists for decades. Recent elucidation of the famously coined "devious strategies for stability in enduring natural systems" has opened up a new field of computational analyses of complex ecological networks where the nonlinear dynamics of many interacting species can be more realistically mod-eled and understood. Here, we describe the first extension of this field to include coupled human-natural systems. This extension elucidates new strategies for sustaining extraction of biomass (e.g., fish, forests, fiber) from ecosystems that account for ecological complexity and can pursue multiple goals such as maximizing economic profit, employment and carbon sequestration by ecosystems. Our more realistic modeling of ecosystems helps explain why simpler "maxi-mum sustainable yield" bioeconomic models underpinning much natural resource extraction policy leads to less profit, biomass, and biodiversity than predicted by those simple models. Current research directions of this integrated natu-ral and social science include applying artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and multiplayer online games
Extinction Rates for Fluctuation-Induced Metastabilities : A Real-Space WKB Approach
The extinction of a single species due to demographic stochasticity is
analyzed. The discrete nature of the individual agents and the Poissonian noise
related to the birth-death processes result in local extinction of a metastable
population, as the system hits the absorbing state. The Fokker-Planck
formulation of that problem fails to capture the statistics of large deviations
from the metastable state, while approximations appropriate close to the
absorbing state become, in general, invalid as the population becomes large. To
connect these two regimes, a master equation based on a real space WKB method
is presented, and is shown to yield an excellent approximation for the decay
rate and the extreme events statistics all the way down to the absorbing state.
The details of the underlying microscopic process, smeared out in a mean field
treatment, are shown to be crucial for an exact determination of the extinction
exponent. This general scheme is shown to reproduce the known results in the
field, to yield new corollaries and to fit quite precisely the numerical
solutions. Moreover it allows for systematic improvement via a series expansion
where the small parameter is the inverse of the number of individuals in the
metastable state
Quasi-stationary distributions
This paper contains a survey of results related to quasi-stationary distributions, which arise in the setting of stochastic dynamical systems that eventually evanesce, and which may be useful in describing the long-term behaviour of such systems before evanescence. We are concerned mainly with continuous-time Markov chains over a finite or countably infinite state space, since these processes most often arise in applications, but will make reference to results for other processes where appropriate. Next to giving an historical account of the subject, we review the most important results on the existence and identification of quasi-stationary distributions for general Markov chains, and give special attention to birth-death processes and related models. Results on the question of whether a quasi-stationary distribution, given its existence, is indeed a good descriptor of the long-term behaviour of a system before evanescence, are reviewed as well. The paper is concluded with a summary of recent developments in numerical and approximation methods
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