Appears in collection : Mathematical Population Dynamics, Ecology and Evolution 2023 / Mathématiques pour la Dynamique des population, l'Ecologie et l'Evolution
Cyclic dynamics are one of the most notable phenomena in population biology and are known to occur in many communities both in the wild and the laboratory. Oscillations in biomass often exceed an order of magnitude, with period lengths ranging from days to decades, and may be spatially synchronized over continental scales. Their underlying causes, however, remain a long-standing enigma. In this presentation I will present modelling analysis from my own work for four paradigmatic case studies. These will present a journey from single species laboratory experiments to the world largest population oscillations, both in in period length and in absolute biomass. I will show that the mechanisms driving the cycles and their synchronization to external forcing may be very different in each case (e.g., predator-prey interactions or synchronized life cycles). But despite these idiosyncratic properties, notions from phase analysis and synchronization theory can be applied to capture observed population dynamics, providing a common theoretic framework for understanding these phenomena that have fascinated ecologists for centuries.
By Vasilis Dakos
By Hélène Morlon
