A microscopic probabilistic description of a locally regulated population and macroscopic approximations (Q1769416)

A spatial ecological system is considered that consists of motionless individuals (such as plants) located in the closure of \(\overline{X}\) of an open connected subset \(X\) of \(R^d\), \(d\geq 1\). The dynamics of the population of plants is described as follows: i) the population starts at time \(t=0\) by a finite number of plants located in accordance with a random measure on \(\overline{X}\); ii) each plant located, say, at point \(x\in\overline{X}\), has three independent exponential clocks: a seed production clock with parameter \(\gamma (x)\), a natural death clock with parameter \(\mu (x)\) and a competition mortality clock with parameter \(\alpha (x)\sum_{i=1}^{I(t)}U(x,x_t^i)\), where \(I(t)\) is the total number of plants in the population at time \(t,\) \(x_t^i, i=1,\ldots, I(t)\) are their locations, and \(U(x,y)\) is the competition kernel; iii) if one of the two death clocks of a plant rings, this plant disappears; iv) if the seed production clock of a plant rings, the plant produces a seed which immediately becomes a mature plant and moves to a place \(x+z,\) where \(z\) is distributed according to a dispersion law \(D(x,dz).\) This model is a generalization of the Bolker-Pacala model [\textit{B. Bolker} and \textit{S. W. Pacala}, Theor. Popul. Biol. 52, 179--197 (1997; Zbl 0890.92020)] in which \(\gamma, \mu, \alpha \) and \(D\) were assumed to be space independent. The authors show that different normalizations of the measure \(\nu_t\) describing the location of plants at time \(t\geq 0\) may lead to different macroscopic approximations of this model as the initial number of plants tends to infinity. To demonstrate this, they give two approximations the first of which is deterministic and solves a nonlinear integro-differential equation while the second one is the so-called superprocess version of the Bolker-Pacala model.