On the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of prey-predator systems

I will discuss some aspects of the dynamics of interacting populations.In particular, I will talk about oscillatory behaviour and environmentally induced large-scale synchronization (Moran effect) in lattice models of prey-predator systems. More complicated models with co-evolution of many interacting species will be also examined. In such models the number of species and some other characteristics show long-time periodic behaviour. Such a scenario is confronted with a possibility of periodicity of mass extinctions in the Earth ecosystem, as suggested by Raup and Sepkoski.