Patchy patterns due to group dispersal

Abstract

The presence of multiple foci in population patterns may be due to various processes arising in the population dynamics. Group dispersal, which has been lightly investigated for airborne species, is one of these processes. We built a stochastic model generating the dispersal of groups of particles. This model may be viewed as an extension of classical dispersal models based on parametric kernels. It has a hierarchical structure: at the first stage group centers are drawn under a classical dispersal kernel; at the second stage the particles are diffused around their group centers. Analytic and simulation results show that group dispersal is a sufficient condition to generate patterns with multiple foci, i.e. patchy patterns, even if the population can remain particularly concentrated.