Effects of Demographic Noise on the Synchronization of a Metapopulation in a Fluctuating Environment

We use the theory of noise-induced phase synchronization to analyze the effects of demographic noise on the synchronization of a metapopulation of predator-prey systems within a fluctuating environment (Moran effect). Treating each local predator-prey population as a stochastic urn model, we derive a Langevin equation for the stochastic dynamics of the metapopulation. Assuming each local population acts as a limit cycle oscillator in the deterministic limit, we use phase reduction and averaging methods to derive the steady-state probability density for pairwise phase differences between oscillators, which is then used to determine the degree of synchronization of the metapopulation.