Project description

The fluctuations of natural populations have fascinated humanity since prehistoric time. Today, population dynamics is not only of purely scientific interest because decision-making related to human activities such as commercial fishing, logging, hunting, agriculture and pest control, is contingent on our best understanding of how and why populations behave as they do. Both biotic interactions and abiotic random forcing are shaping population fluctuations, and this tension between noise and determinism offers conceptual and methodological challenges distinctive from those in other dynamical systems.

We try to understand how demographic processes interact with environmental fluctuations by combining theoretical analysis of population models and statistical analysis of time series data from a wide range of marine and terrestrial study systems.

Månsson, L., & Lundberg, P. 2006. An analysis of the analysis of herbivore population dynamics. Oikos 113: 217-225.

Jonzén, N., Pople, A. R., Grigg, G. C., & Possingham, H. P. 2004. Of sheep and rain - Large-scale population dynamics of the red kangaroo. Journal of Animal Ecology 74: 22-30

Williams, C. K., Ives, A.R., Applegate, R. D., Ripa, J. 2004. The collapse of cycles in the dynamics of North American grouse populations. Ecology Letters 7: 1135- 1142

Ripa, J. & Ives, A. R. 2003. Food web dynamics in correlated and autocorrelated environments. Theoretical Population Biology 64: 369-384

Jonzén, N., Ripa, J. & Lundberg, P. 2002. A theory of stochastic harvesting in stochastic environments. The American Naturalist 159: 427-437

Jonzén, N., Lundberg, P., Ranta, E. & Kaitala, V. 2002. The irreducible uncertainty of the demography-environment interaction in ecology. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 269: 221-225

Jonzén, N., Hedenström, A., Hjort, C., Lindström, Å., Lundberg, P. & Andersson, A. 2002. Climate patterns and the stochastic dynamics of migratory birds. Oikos 97: 329-336

Ripa, J. & Lundberg, P. 2000. The route to extinction in variable environments. Oikos 90: 89-96

Ripa, J. 2000. Analysing the Moran effect and dispersal: their significance and interaction in synchronous population dynamics. Oikos 89: 175-187

Ripa, J. & Heino, M. 1999. Linear analysis solves two puzzles in population dynamics: the route to extinction and extinction in coloured environments. Ecology Letters 2: 219-222 <

Ripa, J., Lundberg, P. & Kaitala, V. 1998. A General Theory of Environmental Noise in Ecological Food Webs. The American Naturalist 151: 3

Ranta, E., Kaitala, V. & Lundberg, P. 1997. The spatial dimension of population fluctuations. Science 278: 1621-1623.

Ripa, J. & Lundberg, P. 1996. Noise colour and the risk of population extinctions. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 263: 1751-1753