EVOLUTION OF MIXED DISPERSAL IN PERIODIC ENVIRONMENTS

Random dispersal describes the movement of organisms between adjacent spatial locations. However, the movement of some organisms such as seeds of plants can occur between non-adjacent spatial locations and is thus non-local. We propose to study a mixed dispersal strategy, which is a combination of random dispersal and non-local dispersal. More specifically, we assume that a fraction of individuals in the population adopt random dispersal, while the remaining fraction assumes non-local dispersal. We investigate how such mixed dispersal affects the invasion of a single species and also how mixed dispersal strategy will evolve in spatially heterogenous but temporally constant environment.