An approximation of populations on a habitat with large carrying capacity

Biological entities are inherently dynamic. As such, various ecological disciplines use mathematical models to describe temporal evolution. Typically, growth curves are modelled as sigmoids, with the evolution modelled by ordinary differential equations. Among the various sigmoid models, the logistic and Gompertz equations are well established and widely used in fitting growth data in the fields of biology and ecology. This paper suggests a statistical interpretation of the l...

This article is an essay, both expository and argumentative, on the Galton-Watson process as a tool in the domain of Branching Processes. It is at the same time the author's ways to honour two distinguished scientists in this domain, both from the Russian Academy of Science, and to congratulate them for their special birthdays coming up very soon. The thread of the article is the role, which the Galton-Watson process had played in the author's own research. We start with an a...

The first chapter concerns monotype population models. We first study general birth and death processes and we give non-explosion and extinction criteria, moment computations and a pathwise representation. We then show how different scales may lead to different qualitative approximations, either ODEs or SDEs. The prototypes of these equations are the logistic (deterministic) equation and the logistic Feller diffusion process. The convergence in law of the sequence of processe...

We consider the problem of finding optimal strategies that maximize the average growth-rate of multiplicative stochastic processes. For a geometric Brownian motion the problem is solved through the so-called Kelly criterion, according to which the optimal growth rate is achieved by investing a constant given fraction of resources at any step of the dynamics. We generalize these finding to the case of dynamical equations with finite carrying capacity, which can find applicatio...

We consider a class of density-dependent branching processes which generalises exponential, logistic and Gompertz growth. A population begins with a single individual, grows exponentially initially, and then growth may slow down as the population size moves towards a carrying capacity. At a time while the population is still growing superlinearly, a fixed number of individuals are sampled and their coalescent tree is drawn. Taking the sampling time and carrying capacity simul...

The Weibull function is widely used to describe skew distributions observed in nature. However, the origin of this ubiquity is not always obvious to explain. In the present paper, we consider the well-known Galton-Watson branching process describing simple replicative systems. The shape of the resulting distribution, about which little has been known, is found essentially indistinguishable from the Weibull form in a wide range of the branching parameter; this can be seen from...

Aphids are damaging insect pests on many crops. Their density can rapidly build up on a host plant to several thousand over one growing season. Occasionally, a competition-driven decline in population early in the season, followed by a build-up later, is observed in the field. Such dynamics cannot be captured via standard models, such as introduced in Kindlmann and Dixon, 2010. In Kindlmann et al., 2007, a logistic non-local population model with variable carrying capacity is...

The paper contains the complete analysis of the Galton-Watson models with immigration, including the processes in the random environment, stationary or non-stationary ones. We also study the branching random walk on $Z^d$ with immigration and prove the existence of the limits for the first two correlation functions.

Reinforced Galton-Watson processes have been introduced in arxiv:2306.02476 as population models with non-overlapping generations, such that reproduction events along genealogical lines can be repeated at random. We investigate here some of their sample path properties such as asymptotic growth rates and survival, for which the effects of reinforcement on the evolution appear quite strikingly.

We observe the Galton-Watson Branching Processes. Limit properties of transition functions and their convergence to invariant measures are investigated.