Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme

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SYNF: Symposium Nonlinear and Fractional Transport in Complex Systems

SYNF 1: Nonlinear and Anomalous Transport in Complex Systems

SYNF 1.5: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 28, 2007, 16:45–17:15, H1

Nonlinear transport processes in large-scale ecological networks — •Bernd Blasius — Institut für Chemie und Biologie des Meeres, Carl-von-Ossietzky.Str. 9-11, Postfach 2503, 26111 Oldenburg

Transport processes play an important role in biological and ecological systems. Such processes increasingly take place on complex networks on global scales, where the spatial landscape is segmented into local habitat islands which are connected by long-range dispersal in a network of invasion pathways. Important examples are the geographical expansion of alien species to new habitats and the global spread of infectious diseases into a new range.

These topics are explored on several case studies. First we study the dynamics of epidemic outbreaks in networks of cities, which are coupled by transport of individuals between cities. We propose that the network topology is defined solely from the size distribution of the cities, which results in a hierarchical synchronization of the epidemic outbreaks and compares well to the dynamics observed in infectious childhood diseases. Secondly we analyze the spread of infectious diseases on adaptive networks where the travel behavior of individuals may change during the onset of an epidemic. This gives rise to a complicated interplay between a time changing network topology and the spatial epidemic state. Finally we study the migratory movement of birds between summer and winter populations on a network of intermediate stopover sites. To mimic this process we introduce a seasonal varying Markov network where the transition rates are a periodic function of time.