Seed production that varies greatly from year to year, known as "masting" or "mast-fruiting" behavior, is a population-level phenomenon known to exhibit geographic synchrony extending, at least in some cases, hundreds of kilometers. The two main nonexclusive hypotheses for the driver of such geographically extensive synchrony are (1) environmental factors (the Moran effect), and (2) the mutual ...

We reconsider the Moran model in continuous time with population size N, two allelic types, and selection. We introduce a new particle representation, which we call the labelled Moran model, and which has the same distribution of type frequencies as the original Moran model, provided the initial values are chosen appropriately. In the new model, individuals are labelled 1,2,…,N; neutral resampl...

The populations of many species fluctuate in synchrony across large geographical areas. This synchrony is often attributed to the Moran effect, that is, shared environmental fluctuations across the region. In this article, I use a series of simple metapopulation models to show that the degree of synchrony among populations separated by different distances is strongly affected by the particular ...

The Moran model is a discrete-time birth and death Markov chain describing the evolution of the number of type 1 alleles in an haploid population with two alleles whose total size N is preserved during the course of evolution. Bias mechanisms such as mutations or selection can affect its neutral dynamics. For the ergodic Moran model with mutations, we get interested into the fixation probabilit...

The distributions of the times to the first common ancestor tmrca is numerically studied for an ecological population model, the extended Moran model. This model has a fixed population size N . The number of descendants is drawn from a beta distribution Beta(α, 2 − α) for various choices of α. This includes also the classical Moran model (α → 0) as well as the uniform distribution (α = 1). Usin...

We construct an individual-based metapopulation model of population genetics featuring migration, mutation, selection, and genetic drift. In the case of a single "island," the model reduces to the Moran model. Using the diffusion approximation and time-scale separation arguments, an effective one-variable description of the model is developed. The effective description bears similarities to the...