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 $3\times 10^7$ organisms and $10^5$ 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.

10 pages, 15 figures included, final version as published

References in corpus (5)

• Infinite-randomness critical point in the two-dimensional disordered contact process
• Monte-Carlo simulations of the clean and disordered contact process in three dimensions
• Contact process with temporal disorder
• Spatio-temporal generalization of the Harris criterion and its application to diffusive disorder
• Enhanced rare region effects in the contact process with long-range correlated disorder

Cited by in corpus (8)

• A comprehensive phase diagram for logistic populations in fluctuating environment
• Phase diagram for a logistic system under bounded stochasticity
• Population Extinction on a Random Fitness Seascape
• Dispersal-induced resilience to stochastic environmental fluctuations in populations with Allee effect
• A Seascape Origin of Richards Growth
• Contact process with simultaneous spatial and temporal disorder
• Nonuniversal and anomalous critical behavior of the contact process near an extended defect
• Contact process with aperiodic temporal disorder