Abstract

Boolean and polynomial models of biological systems have emerged recently as viable companions to differential equations models. It is not immediately clear however whether such models are capable of capturing the multi-stable behaviour of certain biological systems: this behaviour is often sensitive to changes in the values of the model parameters, while Boolean and polynomial models are qualitative in nature. In the past few years, Boolean models of gene regulatory systems have been shown to capture multi-stability at the molecular level, confirming that such models can be used to obtain information about the system’s qualitative dynamics when precise information regarding its parameters may not be available. In this paper, we examine Boolean approximations of a classical ODE model of budworm outbreaks in a forest and show that these models exhibit a qualitative behaviour consistent with that derived from the ODE models. In particular, we demonstrate that these models can capture the bistable nature of insect population outbreaks, thus showing that Boolean models can be successfully utilized beyond the molecular level.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Letters in Biomathematics, v. 3, issue 1, p. 1-18.

© 2016 The Author(s).

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1080/23737867.2016.1197804

Included in

Mathematics Commons

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