Noise Induced Phenomena in Lotka-Volterra Systems.pdfVIP

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 3 1 0 5 8 5 v 2 [ c o n d - m a t .s t a t - m e c h ] 2 7 O c t 2 0 0 3 Fluctuation and Noise Letters Vol. 3, No. 2 (2003) 000–000 c? World Scientific Publishing Company NOISE INDUCED PHENOMENA IN LOTKA-VOLTERRA SYSTEMS B. Spagnolo?, A. Fiasconaro and D. Valenti Istituto Nazionale di Fisica della Materia, Unita? di Palermo and Dipartimento di Fisica e Tecnologie Relative, University of Palermo Viale delle Scienze, I-90128 Palermo, Italy ?spagnolo@unipa.it Received (21 November 2002) Revised (26 March 2003) Accepted (27 March 2003) We study the time evolution of two ecosystems in the presence of external noise and climatic periodical forcing by a generalized Lotka-Volterra (LV) model. In the first ecosystem, composed by two competing species, we find noise induced phenomena such as: (i) quasi deterministic oscillations, (ii) stochastic resonance, (iii) noise delayed extinc- tion and (iv) spatial patterns. In the second ecosystem, composed by three interacting species (one predator and two preys), using a discrete model of the LV equations we find that the time evolution of the spatial patterns is strongly dependent on the initial conditions of the three species. Keywords: Statistical mechanics; population dynamics; noise induced effects; Lotka- Volterra equations. 1. Introduction The study of the effects of noise is a well established subject in several different disciplines ranging from physics, to chemistry and to biology [1]. The essential role of the noise in theoretical ecology however has been recently recognized. Some key questions in population ecology are related to the understanding of the role that noise, climatic forcing and nonlinear interactions between individuals of the same or different species play on the dynamics of the ecosystems [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. More recently noise induced effects on population dynamics have been investi- gated [13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]. In this paper we study the dynamics of two