TY - JOUR
T1 - Lyapunov exponents and the mathematics of invasion in oscillatory or chaotic populations
AU - Ferriere, R.
AU - Gatto, M.
PY - 1995/10
Y1 - 1995/10
N2 - This paper concisely reviews the mathematical properties of the dominant Lyapunov exponent of a matrix sequence in the context of population biology. The concept of Lyapunov exponent provides a valuable tool for investigating processes of invasion in ecology or genetics, which are crucial in shaping community diversity, determining the spread of epidemics or the fixation of a new mutation. The appeal of the invasibility criterion based on the dominant Lyapunov exponent lies in the opportunity it offers to deal with population structure, complex life cycles, and complex population dynamics resulting from the model nonlinearities (oscillations, chaos), as well as random fluctuations arising from a stochastic environment. We put emphasis on the issues of the existence, numerical approximation, and regularity of the dominant Lyapunov exponent. Our presentation is aimed at showing that, despite our inability to compute the exponent analytically, which adds to its high intrinsic instability, important biological insights can nevertheless be achieved at the cost of fairly mild assumptions on the features of the models considered.
AB - This paper concisely reviews the mathematical properties of the dominant Lyapunov exponent of a matrix sequence in the context of population biology. The concept of Lyapunov exponent provides a valuable tool for investigating processes of invasion in ecology or genetics, which are crucial in shaping community diversity, determining the spread of epidemics or the fixation of a new mutation. The appeal of the invasibility criterion based on the dominant Lyapunov exponent lies in the opportunity it offers to deal with population structure, complex life cycles, and complex population dynamics resulting from the model nonlinearities (oscillations, chaos), as well as random fluctuations arising from a stochastic environment. We put emphasis on the issues of the existence, numerical approximation, and regularity of the dominant Lyapunov exponent. Our presentation is aimed at showing that, despite our inability to compute the exponent analytically, which adds to its high intrinsic instability, important biological insights can nevertheless be achieved at the cost of fairly mild assumptions on the features of the models considered.
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U2 - 10.1006/tpbi.1995.1024
DO - 10.1006/tpbi.1995.1024
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0029477509
VL - 48
SP - 126
EP - 171
JO - Theoretical Population Biology
JF - Theoretical Population Biology
SN - 0040-5809
IS - 2
ER -