Mathematical Biology Seminar
Roy Wright
U C Davis
Friday Jan. 25, 2008
3:05pm in LCB 225
"Mathematical Methods for
Connecting Ecological Scales "
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Abstract:
The idea of scale is relevant in many fields of applied
mathematics, with particular and fundamental importance to
mathematical ecology. Time scales are a natural feature of ecological
systems because interacting species often have life cycles of
radically differing length. Examples include the interaction of
herbivores with plants -- especially trees, pathogens with their
hosts, and some prey species with their predators. Spatial scales
become relevant when individuals of distinct species have differing
levels of movement. For example, a predator population may habitually
hunt over an area wide enough to include several less mobile prey
populations, or a flightless insect may be victimized by a highly
mobile winged exploiter. Another issue of scale is the connection of
individual-level behavior with population-level phenomena through the
modeling process. This occurs in nearly all fields; one prominent
example is the derivation of the Ideal Gas Law from assumptions about
individual gas atoms. But in ecology, the connection between a model
and the individual actions from which it is derived takes on a greater
importance, since organisms are far less predictable than atoms and do
not exist in populations as large as Avogadro's number. In this talk I
will describe some of the mathematical tools that have been and
continue to be used to better understand ecological problems in which
scale issues play an important role.
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Mathematical Biology Program
Department of Mathematics
University of Utah
155 South 1400 East Room 233
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
rasmusse@math.utah.edu
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