Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
4502875 Theoretical Population Biology 2008 14 Pages PDF
Abstract

I present a general diffusion-based modeling framework for the analysis of animal movements in heterogeneous landscapes, including terms representing advection, mortality, and edge-mediated behavior. I use adjoint operator theory to develop mathematical machinery for the assessment of a number of biologically relevant quantities, such as occupancy times, hitting probabilities, quasi-stationary distributions, the backwards equation, and conditional probability densities. I derive finite-element approximations, which can be used to obtain numerical solutions in domains which do not allow for an analytical treatment. As an example, I model the movements of the butterfly Melitaea cinxia in an island consisting of a set of habitat patches and the intervening matrix habitat. I illustrate the behavior of the model and the mathematical theory by examining the effects of a hypothetical movement barrier and advection caused by prevailing wind conditions.

Related Topics
Life Sciences Agricultural and Biological Sciences Agricultural and Biological Sciences (General)
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