Lotka-Volterra and Related Systems

The De Gruyter Series in Mathematics and Life Sciences is devoted to the publication of monographs in the field. They cover topics and methods in fields of current interest that use mathematical approaches to understand and explain, model and influence phenomena in all areas of life sciences. This includes, among others, theory and application of biological mathematical modeling, complex systems biology, bioinformatics, computational biomodeling stochastic modeling, biostatistics, computational evolutionary biology, comparative genomics, or structural bioinformatics. Also, new types of mathematical problems that arise from biological knowledge shall be covered.

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In recent years, there has been a tremendous amount of research activity in the general area of population dynamics, particularly the Lotka-Volterra system, which has been a rich source of mathematical ideas from both theoretical and application points of view. In spite of the technological advances, many authors seem to be unaware of the bulk of the work that has been done in this area recently. This often leads to duplication of work and frustration to the authors as well as to the editors of various journals. This book is built out of lecture notes and consists of three chapters written by four mathematicians with overlapping expertise that cover a broad sector of the research in this area. Each chapter consists of carefully written introductory exposition, main breakthroughs, open questions and bibliographies. The chapters present recent developments on topics involving the dynamic behavior of solutions and topics such as stability theory, permanence, persistence, extinction, existence of positive solutions for the Lotka-Volterra and related systems. This fills a void in the literature, by making available a source book of relevant information on the theory, methods and applications of an important area of research.