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We investigate the problem of the Lévy flight foraging hypothesis in an ecological niche described by a bounded region of space, with either absorbing or reflecting boundary conditions. To this end, we consider a forager diffusing according to a fractional heat equation in a bounded domain and we define several efficiency functionals whose optimality is discussed in relation to the fractional exponent s∈(0,1) of the diffusive equation. Such an equation is taken to be the spectral fractional heat equation (with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions). We analyze the biological scenarios in which a target is close to the forager or far from it. In particular, for all the efficiency functionals considered here, we show that if the target is close enough to the forager, then the most rewarding search strategy will be in a small neighborhood of s=0. Interestingly, we show that s=0 is a global pessimizer for some of the efficiency functionals. From this, together with the aforementioned optimality results, we deduce that the most rewarding strategy can be unsafe or unreliable in practice, given its proximity with the pessimizing exponent, thus the forager may opt for a less performant, but safer, hunting method. The biological literature has collected several pieces of evidence of foragers diffusing with very low Lévy exponents, often in relation with a high energetic content of the prey. It is thereby suggestive to relate these patterns, which are induced by distributions with a very fat tail, with a high-risk/high-gain strategy, in which the forager adopts a potentially very profitable, but also potentially completely unrewarding, strategy due to the high value of the possible outcome.

This volume collects contributions from the speakers at an INdAM Intensive period held at the University of Bari in 2017. The contributions cover several aspects of partial differential equations whose development in recent years has experienced major breakthroughs in terms of both theory and applications. The topics covered include nonlocal equations, elliptic equations and systems, fully nonlinear equations, nonlinear parabolic equations, overdetermined boundary value problems, maximum principles, geometric analysis, control theory, mean field games, and bio-mathematics. The authors are trailblazers in these topics and present their work in a way that is exhaustive and clearly accessible to PhD students and early career researcher. As such, the book offers an excellent introduction to a variety of fundamental topics of contemporary investigation and inspires novel and high-quality research.

This book presents in a detailed and self-contained way a new and important density result in the analysis of fractional partial differential equations, while also covering several fundamental facts about space- and time-fractional equations.

These lecture notes are devoted to the analysis of a nonlocal equation in the whole of Euclidean space. In studying this equation, all the necessary material is introduced in the most self-contained way possible, giving precise references to the literature when necessary. The results presented are original, but no particular prerequisite or knowledge of the previous literature is needed to read this text. The work is accessible to a wide audience and can also serve as introductory research material on the topic of nonlocal nonlinear equations.