Evolution of dispersal in spatial population models with multiple timescales (Q2297270)

The authors study the evolutionary stability of population dispersal strategies that can work if all people in the population have the same physical shape and there is no movement of people in equilibrium. The main conclusion of the authors, confirmed by studies of specific cases is that, when using systems of ordinary differential equations, the coefficients of which are weighted spatial average parameters describing the heterogeneity of the environment, where the weights are determined by the eigenfunctions of the reaction-diffusion-advection operators describing the dispersion of populations, many kinds of results on the effects and evolution of dispersion that were developed for models based on data on reaction-diffusion-advection systems and their nonlocal analogues can be restored. This suggests that, for populations group where scattering occurs in a shorter time than population dynamics, the aggregation method can be effectively used to solve issues related to conditional dispersion in spatially heterogeneous environments. Transfer of models from partial differential equations to ordinary differential equations is a significant simplification, although identifying the effects of scattering strategies in heterogeneous media is still a non-trivial problem in the simplified mode. In addition, the methods and results of the authors make it possible to associate population models, including mechanistic descriptions of dispersion based on reaction-diffusion-advection models, with landscape models based on spatial type averaging. The biological significance of the authors' models lies in the fact that many qualitative conclusions about the evolution of dispersal and related topics were developed using models operating on the same time scale. Thus, predictions about the effect and evolution of dispersion made by different types of models in which scattering and population dynamics act on the same time scale are reliable compared to the presence and diversity of different time scales for these processes. Specific examples are predictions that a suitable amount of advection on environmental gradients is beneficial, and that dispersion strategies that can provide perfect free distribution are evolutionarily stable compared to strategies that cannot.