Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Population Biology
Individual Based Model To Simulate The Evolution Of Insecticide Resistance, William B. Jamieson
Individual Based Model To Simulate The Evolution Of Insecticide Resistance, William B. Jamieson
Department of Mathematics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Insecticides play a critical role in agricultural productivity. However, insecticides impose selective pressures on insect populations, so the Darwinian principles of natural selection predict that resistance to the insecticide is likely to form in the insect populations. Insecticide resistance, in turn, severely reduces the utility of the insecticides being used. Thus there is a strong economic incentive to reduce the rate of resistance evolution. Moreover, resistance evolution represents an example of evolution under novel selective pressures, so its study contributes to the fundamental understanding of evolutionary theory.
Insecticide resistance often represents a complex interplay of multiple fitness trade-offs for individual …
Modeling And Mathematical Analysis Of Plant Models In Ecology, Eric A. Eager
Modeling And Mathematical Analysis Of Plant Models In Ecology, Eric A. Eager
Department of Mathematics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Population dynamics tries to explain in a simple mechanistic way the variations of the size and structure of biological populations. In this dissertation we use mathematical modeling and analysis to study the various aspects of the dynamics of plant populations and their seed banks.
In Chapter 2 we investigate the impact of structural model uncertainty by considering different nonlinear recruitment functions in an integral projection model for Cirsium canescens. We show that, while having identical equilibrium populations, these two models can elicit drastically different transient dynamics. We then derive a formula for the sensitivity of the equilibrium population to …