Spatiotemporal patterns in ecology and epidemiology

The book is organized as follows. Part I starts with a general overview of relevant phenomena in ecology and epidemiology, giving also a few examples of pattern formation in natural systems, and then proceeds to a brief synopsis of existing modeling approaches. Part II deals with nonspatial models of population dynamics and epidemiology. We have already mentioned that the dynamics of spatial and corresponding nonspatial systems can be essentially different and the results of nonspatial analysis may, in some cases, be misleading. Nevertheless, it is also clear that the properties of nonspatial dynamics provides a certain `skeleton' important for thorough understanding of spatiotemporal dynamics. Correspondingly, Part II starts from basic ideas and elementary models and eventually brings the reader to the state-of-the-art in this science. In Part III, we introduce space by means of including ``diffusion'' of the individuals and consider the main scenarios of spatial and spatiotemporal pattern formation in deterministic models of population dynamics. Finally, in Part IV, we address the issue of interaction between deterministic and stochastic processes in ecosystem/epidemics dynamics, give a synthesis of the corresponding modeling approaches and consider how noise and stochasticity may affect pattern formation.