Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Efforts to manage and control ecological systems are becoming increasingly challenging and also critical in our changing world. Solving these challenges entails advanced mathematical modeling to understands how ecological systems might respond to both natural environmental changes and control efforts by humans. In this talk, I will demonstrate how to incorporate space and stochasticity into ecological models in a manner that keeps them simple enough to solve and analyze. Specifically, I will demonstrate how to (i) use evolutionary game theory to explain the distribution of body-sizes in ecosystems, (ii) extend the Master equation to include space and explain spatial distributions of predators and prey, and (iii) find general principles that may guide optimal control of ecosystems.