|
I'm interested in stochastic processes in theoretical ecology and evolution and its applications to effective science policy. Organisms live in an unpredictable world, facing fluctuating environments and demographics. Effective decision-making must account for this variability in policy ranging from conservation law to the management of natural resources, whether controlling disease epidemics or stopping the spread of invasive species. An understanding of these stochastic fluctuations, often described as noise, operates on three levels: what it hides, what it does, and what it reveals.
The simplest view of these fluctuations asks what they are hiding: how can we strip away the noise to see the general pattern. I am developing and exploring methods to estimate the size and frequency of noise in population abundances, helping us deduce what changes occur by chance and what are part of a larger pattern.
Noise can do more than blur the picture; it can change it entirely. If fluctuations in a population become too large, a species will risk extinction merely by chance. Here I am exploring how autocorrelation in environmental fluctuations can impact the extinction risk of a population otherwise expected to persist.
Not only can noise hide a pattern, but sometimes it can be used to reveal it. For instance, as habitat becomes increasing fragmented, theory predicts that the fraction of unoccupied but habitable land remains the same until it is too late to save the population. However, the variation in this quantity changes in a predictable way with increased fragmentation, and could be used to detect this approach to disaster. I'm also exploring how predictions of this variation could inform comparisons between candidate population models.
1) Wray, J., Bahcall, N., Bode, P., Boettiger, C., Hopkins, P. (2006) "The Shape, Multiplicity, and Evolution of Superclusters in ΛCDM Cosmology." Astrophysical Journal 652, 907.
2) Boettiger, C., Dushoff, J., Weitz, J. (2010) "Fluctuation Domains in Adaptive Evolution." Theoretical Population Biology 77, 6-13.
3) Boettiger, C. "Clonal Inteference Models in Population Genetics," Princeton University, Junior paper, 2006.
4) Boettiger, C. "Adaptive Dynamics: Branching Phenomena and the Canonical Equation," Princeton University, Junior Paper, 2006.
5) Boettiger, C. "Ensemble behavior from individual dynamics in forest populations," Thesis, Princeton University, 2007.
|
