Search results for "POPULATION DYNAMICS"
showing 10 items of 281 documents
Recent benthic foraminiferal assemblages and their relationship to environmental variables on the shoreface and inner shelf off Valencia (Western Med…
2014
The environmental variables that determine the distributions of benthic foraminiferal assemblages on the shoreface and inner shelf of the north of Valencia province (Western Mediterranean) are identified. The possible influence of variables such as water depth, distance from shore, hydrodynamics, substrate type, carbonate content, organic matter content and human activity is evaluated. Multivariate cluster-Q-type analysis and redundancy analysis (RDA) are used to identify the environmental variables that have the greatest influence on the assemblage distribution. The spatial distribution of the assemblages is closely associated with water depth and substrate. The diversity and abundance of …
Large-scale effects of migration and conflict in pre-agricultural groups: Insights from a dynamic model.
2016
The debate on the causes of conflict in human societies has deep roots. In particular, the extent of conflict in hunter-gatherer groups remains unclear. Some authors suggest that large-scale violence only arose with the spreading of agriculture and the building of complex societies. To shed light on this issue, we developed a model based on operatorial techniques simulating population-resource dynamics within a two-dimensional lattice, with humans and natural resources interacting in each cell of the lattice. The model outcomes under different conditions were compared with recently available demographic data for prehistoric South America. Only under conditions that include migration among c…
Contrasting age-specific recruitment and survival at different spatial scales: A case study with the European storm petrel
2009
Evolutionary studies on optimal decisions or conservation guidelines are often derived by generalising patterns from a single population, while inter-population variability in life-history traits is seldom considered. We investigated here how survival and recruitment probabilities changed with age at different geographical scales using the encounter histories of 5523 European storm petrels from three Mediterranean colonies, and also how our estimates of these parameters might be expected to affect population growth rates using population matrix models. We recorded similar patterns among colonies, but also important biological differences. Local survival, recruitment and breeding success inc…
Halfway up the trophic chain: development of parasite communities in the sparid fish Boops boops
2007
SUMMARYWe examined the patterns of composition and structure of parasite communities in the Mediterranean sparid fish Boops boops along a gradient of fish sizes, using a large sample from a single population. We tested the hypothesis that species forming the core of the bogue parasite fauna (i.e. species which have a wide geographical range and are responsible for recognizable community structure) appear early in the fish ontogeny. The sequential community development observed supported the prediction that core species appear in the fish population earlier than rare and stochastic species. There was also a strong correlation between the order of ‘arrival’ of the species and their overall pr…
Long-Term Coexistence of Rotifer Cryptic Species
2011
Despite their high morphological similarity, cryptic species often coexist in aquatic habitats presenting a challenge in the framework of niche differentiation theory and coexistence mechanisms. Here we use a rotifer species complex inhabiting highly unpredictable and fluctuating salt lakes to gain insights into the mechanisms involved in stable coexistence in cryptic species. We combined molecular barcoding surveys of planktonic populations and paleogenetic analysis of diapausing eggs to reconstruct the current and historical coexistence dynamics of two highly morphologically similar rotifer species, B. plicatilis and B. manjavacas. In addition, we carried out laboratory experiments using …
Graphical representation of some duality relations in stochastic population models
2007
We derive a unified stochastic picture for the duality of a resampling-selection model with a branching-coalescing particle process (cf. http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=MR2123250) and for the self-duality of Feller's branching diffusion with logistic growth (cf. math/0509612). The two dual processes are approximated by particle processes which are forward and backward processes in a graphical representation. We identify duality relations between the basic building blocks of the particle processes which lead to the two dualities mentioned above.
Ancestral processes in population genetics-the coalescent.
2000
A special stochastic process, called the coalescent, is of fundamental interest in population genetics. For a large class of population models this process is the appropriate tool to analyse the ancestral structure of a sample of n individuals or genes, if the total number of individuals in the population is sufficiently large. A corresponding convergence theorem was first proved by Kingman in 1982 for the Wright-Fisher model and the Moran model. Generalizations to a large class of exchangeable population models and to models with overlying mutation processes followed shortly later. One speaks of the "robustness of the coalescent, as this process appears in many models as the total populati…
Role of sub- and super-Poisson noise sources in population dynamics
2020
In this paper we present a study on pulse noise sources characterized by sub- and super-Poisson statistics. We make a comparison with their uncorrelated counterpart. i.e. pulse noise with Poisson statistics, while showing that the correlation properties of sub- and super-Poisson noise sources can be efficiently applied to population dynamics. Specifically, we consider a termite population, described by a Langevin equation in the presence of a pulse noise source, and we study its dynamics and stability properties for two models. The first one describes a population of several colonies in a new territory with adverse environmental conditions. The second one considers the development of a sing…
Effects of solar irradiance noise on a complex marine trophic web
2022
AbstractThe analysis of experimental data of the solar irradiance, collected on the marine surface, clearly highlights the intrinsic stochasticity of such an environmental parameter. Given this result, effects of randomly fluctuating irradiance on the population dynamics of a marine ecosystem are studied on the basis of the stochastic 0-dimensional biogeochemical flux model. The noisy fluctuations of the irradiance are formally described as a multiplicative Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, that is a self-correlated Gaussian noise. Nonmonotonic behaviours of the variance of the marine populations’ biomass are found with respect to the intensity and the autocorrelation time of the noise source, ma…
Modeling of Sensory Characteristics Based on the Growth of Food Spoilage Bacteria
2016
During last years theoretical works shed new light and proposed new hypothesis on the mechanisms which regulate the time behaviour of biological populations in different natural systems. Despite of this, the role of environmental variables in ecological systems is still an open question. Filling this gap of knowledge is a crucial task for a deeper comprehension of the dynamics of biological populations in real ecosystems. In this work we study how the dynamics of food spoilage bacteria influences the sensory characteristics of fresh fish specimens. This topic is crucial for a better understanding of the role played by the bacterial growth on the organoleptic properties, and for the quality …