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)