Environmental Disorder Regulation of Invasion and Genetic Loss

TL;DR

This paper investigates how environmental stochasticity in habitat diffusivity influences biological invasion and genetic diversity loss, revealing that fluctuations can either suppress or enhance genetic drift.

Contribution

It introduces a Langevin model for invasion front dynamics that links environmental fluctuations to genetic loss regulation, offering new insights into spatial evolutionary processes.

Findings

Small fluctuations suppress genetic loss

Large fluctuations intensify genetic loss

Environmental variability acts as a regulatory factor

Abstract

Many physical and natural systems, including the population of species, evolve in habitats with spatial stochastic variations of the individuals' motility. We study here the effect of those fluctuations on invasion and genetic loss. A Langevin equation for the \textit{position} and \textit{border} of the invasion front is obtained. A striking result is that small/large fluctuations of diffusivity suppress/intensify genetic loss. Our findings reveal the potential role of environmental fluctuations as a regulating factor for genetic loss and provide a simple explanation for the regional differences in the intensity of genetic drift observed during the final stages of human evolution and in tumor mutational landscapes.