Math Biology Seminar: Matthew Osmond

Environmental challenges, such as pollution and anti-biotics, can cause populations to decline towards extinction. But declining populations can also be rescued from extinction by sufficiently fast adaptive evolution. In this talk I’ll describe some simple mathematical models we’ve created and analyzed to predict when and how evolutionary rescue will occur. In particular I’ll talk about how we’ve used branching process theory and a geometrical representation of trait space to predict how many mutations evolutionary rescue is likely to take and what the characteristics of these mutations will be given population survival.