Noise Induced Phenomena in Lotka-Volterra Systems

Abstract

We study the time evolution of two ecosystems in the presence of external noise and climatic periodical forcing by a generalized Lotka-Volterra (LV) model. In the first ecosystem, composed by two competing species, we find noise induced phenomena such as: (i) quasi deterministic oscillations, (ii) stochastic resonance, (iii) noise delayed extinction and (iv) spatial patterns. In the second ecosystem, composed by three interacting species (one predator and two preys), using a discrete model of the LV equations we find that the time evolution of the spatial patterns is strongly dependent on the initial conditions of the three species.