Population survival in spatiotemporal environments

During the last decades, human footprint on the environment has increased, promoting drastic transformations in the ecological landscape, climate and animal behavioral patterns. Then, now more than ever, it becomes important to understand in a broad perspective the ecosystem stability in terms of the habitat spatiotemporal structure and population dynamics. In this seminar, we will focus on population survival, investigating the asymptotic behavior of the total population size in different scenarios. From the single habitat domain case to complex landscapes, we will discuss how the presence of nonlinear dynamics, spatial knowledge and environment oscillations affect the critical conditions for survival. Among other interesting results, we will see that the ecological common sense that large habitats are beneficial to population survival breaks down when the dynamics is strongly nonlinear. In general, our findings highlight relevant issues that should be taken into account in practical situations, such as preservation and management of natural habitats and ecological reserves.