Analytical and numerical tools for diffusion-based movement models

Abstract

I present a general diffusion-based modeling framework for the analysis of animal movements in heterogeneous landscapes, including terms representing advection, mortality, and edge-mediated behavior. I use adjoint operator theory to develop mathematical machinery for the assessment of a number of biologically relevant quantities, such as occupancy times, hitting probabilities, quasi-stationary distributions, the backwards equation, and conditional probability densities. I derive finite-element approximations, which can be used to obtain numerical solutions in domains which do not allow for an analytical treatment. As an example, I model the movements of the butterfly Melitaea cinxia in an island consisting of a set of habitat patches and the intervening matrix habitat. I illustrate the behavior of the model and the mathematical theory by examining the effects of a hypothetical movement barrier and advection caused by prevailing wind conditions.