Phys Rev E. 2018 Feb;97(2):020302. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.97.020302.

Reducing the extinction risk of stochastic populations via nondemographic noise.

Physical review. E

Shay Be'er, Michael Assaf

PMID: 29548157 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.97.020302

Abstract

We consider nondemographic noise in the form of uncertainty in the reaction step size and reveal a dramatic effect this noise may have on the stability of self-regulating populations. Employing the reaction scheme mA→kA but allowing, e.g., the product number k to be a priori unknown and sampled from a given distribution, we show that such nondemographic noise can greatly reduce the population's extinction risk compared to the fixed k case. Our analysis is tested against numerical simulations, and by using empirical data of different species, we argue that certain distributions may be more evolutionary beneficial than others.

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• Journal Article