MODELING THE ROLE OF MUTATIONS AND DENSITY INDEPENDENT DISPERSAL IN EVOLUTIONARY RESCUE

Faced with a strong and sudden deterioration of environment, a population encounters two possible options — adapt or perish. In general, it is not known which of those outcomes the environmental changes will lead to. Building on experimental research, we introduce a discrete-space, discrete-time model for environmental rescue based on the influence of population dispersal, as well as, potentially beneficial mutations. Numerical results obtained by the model are shown to correspond well to experimentally obtained data.