title: Spatially correlated disturbances in a locally dispersing population model.
abstract: The basic contact process in continuous time is studied, where instead of single occupied sites becoming empty independently, larger-scale disturbance events simultaneously remove the population from contiguous blocks of sites. Stochastic spatial simulations and pair approximations were used to investigate the model. Increasing the spatial scale of disturbance events increases spatial clustering of the population and variability in growth rates within localized regions, reduces the effective overall population density, and increases the critical reproductive rate necessary for the population to persist. Pair approximations yield a closed-form analytic expression for equilibrium population density and the critical value necessary for persistence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, 333 Neville Hall, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5752, USA. hiebeler@math.umaine.edu
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hiebeler
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001723:Birth Rate; D008954:Models, Biological; D011156:Population Density; D011157:Population Dynamics; D013269:Stochastic Processes