This week we meet

[Thomas Daniel <danielt@u.washington.edu>]

Come one, come all to the autumnal kick-off of Mathematical Biology.

We meet in 114 Kincaid Hall at 12:30 (sharp!)


Our first speaker, Timothy Reluga of Applied Mathematics will speak on:


Wildland Fires and Competitive Survival

Abstract:
        Every summer, grassland fires and forest fires burn large
portions
of wildlands in the United States.  These fires are a major selectional
pressure on communities, the most common means by which successional
processes are reset, and an important source of differential survival
among competing species. The first part of the talk will focus on two
examples of competition where fire is important: Cheatgrass-Sagebrush
interactions in the western US, and Oak-Maple interactions in the
eastern
US.  In both of these examples, there is evidence that the regional fire

cycle may play a decisive role in competition, but it has been more
difficult to demonstrate that competitive survival factors have, in
turn,
evolved to alter regional fire dynamics. The second part of the talk
will
present some discrete time models which attempt to incorporate fire
effects within resource based Lotka-Volterra theory, and explore the
ramifications of these models.