Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Description

Organisms live in landscapes where key environmental factors (e.g. temperature, precipitation, nutrient availability, predation risk) vary from location to location and from moment to moment. Since these environmental factors can determine whether an individual survives and the extent of its reproductive success, individuals are faced with a fundamental quandary: should they stay where they are or should they disperse elsewhere? To understand the ecological and evolutionary implications of dispersal in spatially and temporally variable environments, I will present a variety of analytical results about a class of random difference equations. Several open questions concerning random matrix products and dynamical systems will be raised.