Statistics of branched populations split into different types

Overview & Synopsis

Some population is made of n individuals that can be of P possible species (or types) at equilibrium. How are individuals scattered among types? We study two random scenarios of such species abundance distributions. In the first one, each species grows from independent founders according to a Galton-Watson branching process. When the number of founders P is either fixed or random (either Poisson or geometrically-distributed), a question raised is: given a population of n individuals as a whole, how does it split into the species types? This model is one pertaining to forests of Galton-Watson trees. A second scenario that we will address in a similar way deals with forests of increasing trees. Underlying this setup, the creation/annihilation of clusters (trees) is shown to result from a recursive nucleation/aggregation process as one additional individual is added to the total population.