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International Conference on Mathematical Biology and

Annual Meeting of The Society for Mathematical Biology,

July 27-30, 2009

University of British Columbia, Vancouver

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Program

MSG5d
Frithjof Lutscher
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa, Canada
Title Approximations and rules of thumb for persistence and spread in heterogeneous landscapes
Abstract The spread of non-indigenous species and diseases poses a major risk to ecosystems and human health worldwide. The key challenges to management and control of such invasions are to understand the conditions of spread and the different factors influencing the speed of spread. Of particular interest is the effect of landscape heterogeneity on the spread of organisms. We formulate a discrete-time model for growth and dispersal, where both of these processes vary in space. We then present approximation formulas for the spread rate in such a heterogeneous landscape and demonstrate their validity by comparison with numerical simulation. We also give rules of thumb for the conditions under which a species is able to spread in a heterogeneous landscape. We separately consider the two cases with and without Allee effect in the population growth function. Our results provide simple recipes for calculation of spread rates in complex landscapes together with their limits of validity.
LocationWoodward 5