UAlberta Math Biology Seminar: Chris Heggerud

Transient dynamics are referred to as those dynamics that happen on ecologically relevant timescales, in which classical modelling techniques often fail to capture. Due to the ever-changing environments and ecosystems, increased interest has been placed on the study of transient dynamics. However, many of the advances made towards understanding transients are fundamentally mathematical and beg to be connected to ecology and ecological data. In this talk I will show how uniting the underlying theory of dynamical attractors and empirical dynamical modelling we can understand when an ecological system is in a transient state based solely on ecological time series data. We further show that several metrics can be used to predict when a transient event is coming to an end. This work connects the mathematical literature on transient dynamics to the real-world application of understanding transients and short-term changes in ecological systems.