Integro-differential Models for Evolutionary Dynamics of Populations in Time-heterogeneous Environments

Download or read book Integro-differential Models for Evolutionary Dynamics of Populations in Time-heterogeneous Environments written by Susely Figueroa Iglesias and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis focuses on the qualitative study of several parabolic equations of the Lotka-Volterra type from evolutionary biology and ecology taking into account a time-periodic growth rate and a non-local competition term. In the initial part we first study the dynamics of phenotypically structured populations under the effect of mutations and selection in environments that vary periodically in time and then the impact of a climate change on such population considering environmental conditions which vary according to a linear trend, but in an oscillatory manner. In both problems we first study the long-time behaviour of the solutions. Then we use an approach based on Hamilton-Jacobi equations to study these long-time solutions asymptotically when the effect of mutations is small. We prove that when the effect of mutations vanishes, the phenotypic density of the population is concentrated on a single trait (which varies linearly over time in the second model), while the population size oscillates periodically. For the climate change model we also provide an asymptotic expansion of the mean population size and of the critical speed leading to the extinction of the population, which is closely related to the derivation of an asymptotic expansion of the Floquet eigenvalue in terms of the diffusion rate. In the second part we study some particular examples of growth rates by providing explicit and semi-explicit solutions to the problem and present some numerical illustrations for the periodic model. In addition, being motivated by a biological experiment, we compare two populations evolved in different environments (constant or periodic). In addition, we present a numerical comparison between stochastic and deterministic models modelling the horizontal gene transfer phenomenon. In a Hamilton-Jacobi context, we are able to numerically reproduce the evolutionary rescue of a small population that we observe in the stochastic model.