aStoNiche: Towards a stochastic theory of niche construction

Project Summary: 

Niche construction refers to the situation in which the behavior of organisms in a community can contribute to modifying their environment, which in turn influences the fitness of individuals and their evolution so that the environment can considered an extension of the organism.

This phenomenon of environmental transformation that modifies fitness, although very important for the survival of species, remains poorly understood from a modeling point of view.

We propose to offer a general stochastic formulation for niche construction processes based on nonlinear stochastic processes. We will build niche construction models with a population of individuals interacting in a mean-field mode with their environment, which in turn influences population dynamics through replicator dynamics. We will then look for chaos propagation properties to describe the life history of randomly selected individuals in the population using nonlinear processes, extending the many-to-one and many-to-few formulas of the theory of branching Markov processes.

In France: 

• Nicolas Champagnat, researcher, aStoNiche coordinator, project-team BIGS, Inria Centre at Université de Lorraine, Inria

• Coralie Fritsch, researcher, project-team BIGS, Inria Centre at Université de Lorraine, Inria

• Edouard Strickler, researcher, CNRS, Université de Lorraine, Inria Centre at Université de Lorraine, Inria

• Denis Villemonais, researcher, Université de Lorraine, project-team BIGS, Inria Centre at Université de Lorraine, Inria

• Nicolas Zalduendo-Vidal, PhD student, project-team BIGS, Inria Centre at Université de Lorraine, Inria

In Chile: 

• Rolando Rebolledo, researcher, aStoNiche coordinator, Universidad de Valparaíso

• Pablo Marquet, researcher, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• Cristóbal Quiñinao, researcher, Universidad de O'Higgins

• Leonardo Videla, researcher, Universidad de Santiago

• Nicolás Rivera, researcher, Universidad de Valparaíso

• Mauricio Tejo, researcher, Universidad de Valparaíso

• Inria Chile and Universidad de Valparaíso strengthen ties looking to the future of science and technology and sign a framework cooperation agreement

• Journées Scientifiques Inria Chile 2023 brought together more than 300 French and Chilean researchers in three regions of Chile