How colored environmental noise affects population extinction

Alex Kamenev*, Baruch Meerson, Boris Shklovskii

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

90 Scopus citations

Abstract

Environmental noise can cause an exponential reduction in the mean time to extinction (MTE) of an isolated population. We study this effect on an example of a stochastic birth-death process with rates modulated by a colored (that is, correlated) Gaussian noise. A path integral formulation yields a transparent way of evaluating the MTE and finding the optimal realization of the environmental noise that determines the most probable path to extinction. The population-size dependence of the MTE changes from exponential in the absence of the environmental noise to a power law for a short-correlated noise and to no dependence for long-correlated noise. We also establish the validity domains of the white-noise limit and adiabatic limit.

Original languageAmerican English
Article number268103
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume101
Issue number26
DOIs
StatePublished - 22 Dec 2008

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