View Program - 2022 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference

Explicitly simulating individuals, their locations in 2-d space, and their interactions is useful for studying how populations and genes are distributed across the landscape. But, these simulations can lead to surprising results. A continuous population spontaneously arranges itself into a grid of isolated clusters solely through negative density-dependent reproduction when dispersal distance is less than the interaction distance for density dependence. This is because individuals located between clusters must interact with the individuals in all of the surrounding clusters, whereas individuals in the middle of a cluster only interact with the individuals in that cluster. With low dispersal, individuals rarely disperse into the area between the clusters and the pattern is maintained. I explore the consequences of this pattern for isolation-by-distance.

Under low dispersal, local competition can cause populations in continuous space to divide into discrete clusters