Extinction Phase Transitions in a Model of Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics

Abstract

We study the non-equilibrium phase transition between survival and extinction of spatially extended biological populations using an agent-based model. We especially focus on the effects of global temporal fluctuations of the environmental conditions, i.e., temporal disorder. Using large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations of up to 3 x 107 organisms and 105 generations, we find the extinction transition in time-independent environments to be in the well-known directed percolation universality class. In contrast, temporal disorder leads to a highly unusual extinction transition characterized by logarithmically slow population decay and enormous fluctuations even for large populations. The simulations provide strong evidence for this transition to be of exotic infinite-noise type, as recently predicted by a renormalization group theory. The transition is accompanied by temporal Griffiths phases featuring a power-law dependence of the life time on the population size.

Department(s)

Physics

Research Center/Lab(s)

Center for High Performance Computing Research

Keywords and Phrases

Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1434-6028; 1434-6036

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2017 Springer Heidelberg, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jul 2017

Link to Full Text

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