The Role of Transient Dynamics in Population and Community Ecology
Alan Hastings
Dept. of Environmental Science & Policy, Univ. of California, Davis, USA
Abstract
For many years, studies of dynamics in population and community ecology
have focussed on the long term or asymptotic dynamics of the models. Most
models of food webs, or species persistence, for example, have focussed on
determining the presence of stable attractors. Even studies of highly
nonlinear ecological models have focussed on asymptotic behavior. In
contrast, metapopulation models, by their very nature, have focussed on
dynamics which are transient at the level of the single patch. In this
talk I will present results on both spatially structured models, and on
models of simple food webs which demonstrate that our understanding of
natural communities will require a detailed focus on transient dynamics of
models. I will discuss general conditions from a biological point of view
which will likely lead to transient dyanmics. I will also discuss the role
of stochasticity in generating transient dynamics, and the approaches we
need to use to relate models which exhibit transient dynamics to natural
populations and communities.
