Resonant activation of population extinctions
Abstract
Understanding the mechanisms governing population extinctions is of key importance to many problems in ecology and evolution. Stochastic factors are known to play a central role in extinction, but the interactions between a population's demographic stochasticity and environmental noise remain poorly understood. Here we model environmental forcing as a stochastic fluctuation between two states, one with a higher death rate than the other. We find that, in general, there exists a rate of fluctuations that minimizes the mean time to extinction, a phenomenon previously dubbed "resonant activation." We develop a heuristic description of the phenomenon, together with a criterion for the existence of resonant activation. Specifically, the minimum extinction time arises as a result of the system approaching a scenario wherein the severity of rare events is balanced by the time interval between them. We discuss our findings within the context of more general forms of environmental noise and suggest potential applications to evolutionary models.
Additional Information
© 2017 American Physical Society. Received 24 April 2017; revised manuscript received 28 August 2017; published 30 October 2017. Much of this work was completed at the 2015 Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) Program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The GFD Program is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Award No. OCE-1332750 and the Office of Naval Research. G.R.F. was supported by NSF Award No. OCE-1155205. C.R.D.'s research was also supported in part by NSF Award No. DMS-1515161 and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. C.S. acknowledges support from the NESSF17R graduate fellowship, Proposal No. 17-PLANET17R-0014 for funding, and thanks W. W. Fischer and K. Batygin for enlightening discussions. We would furthermore like to thank the reviewers for providing well thought-out comments that significantly improved the paper.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevE.96.042411.pdf
Submitted - 1710.06274.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 82804
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20171031-124812607
- OCE-1332750
- NSF
- Office of Naval Research (ONR)
- OCE-1155205
- NSF
- DMS-1515161
- NSF
- John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
- 17-PLANET17R-0014
- NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship
- Created
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2017-10-31Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field