UAlberta Math Biology Seminar: Tianxu Wang

Pollution is a pervasive environmental stressor that affects biological systems across multiple levels of organization, from cellular processes to individual behavior and population dynamics. While numerous empirical studies document these effects, general principles linking pollution impacts across scales remain poorly understood.

This work develops a mathematical modeling framework to investigate how pollution-induced perturbations propagate across biological levels and influence ecological systems. At the cellular level, we examine how pollutants disrupt pigment cell interactions and alter fish pattern formation. At the individual level, we study how sub-lethal pollution exposure modifies animal personality traits, such as boldness and shyness, and affects behavioral variability. At the population level, we analyze how pollution interacts with additional environmental stressors, including nutrient limitation and spatially heterogeneous risk, to shape species adaptation, movement strategies, and population stability.

By integrating ordinary and partial differential equations with agent-based models, we establish well-posedness, analyze dynamical behaviors, and support theoretical findings with numerical simulations. Our results demonstrate how small-scale disruptions can generate large-scale ecological consequences, including pattern changes, shifts in population structure, and altered species persistence. Overall, this work provides a unified multiscale perspective on pollution-driven ecological dynamics and offers insights into the mechanisms governing ecological responses to environmental stress.