Studying Complexity and Risk Through Stochastic Population Dynamics: Persistence, Resonance, and Extinction in Ecosystems

Stochasticity provides a way to evaluate risk in complex population dynamics. This chapter describes how basic stochastic processes and algorithms are used to build models of ecological populations which can then derive probability distributions for population persistence and extinction, explain sustained oscillations generated by stochastic resonance, and measure emergent properties of a biological system, all as functions of demographic or environmental stochastic effects.