Grad student Jake Ferguson and Biology faculty member José Miguel Ponciano recently had an article appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/9/2782.abstract
“Environmental stochasticity” is an important theoretical concept in Ecology that embodies the recognition that, over time, the environmental conditions for animal population growth vary widely, often in unpredictable ways. Here we propose a stochastic model that measures how such environmental variation affects competition among individuals. Previously, such effects remained poorly studied and consequences on extinction risks were generally unknown. We apply our model to a large database of time series of animal abundances and compare it to other models. The field evidence supported our modeling efforts. Coupling stochastic models with statistical inference allowed us to draw useful insights for the practice of conservation biology regarding the fate and regulation of these populations.