Universal properties of population dynamics with fluctuating resources

Starting from the well-known field theory for directed percolation (DP), we describe an evolving population, near extinction, in an environment with its own nontrivial spatio-temporal dynamics. Here, we consider the special case where the environment follows a simple relaxational (Model A) dynamics. Two new operators emerge, with upper critical dimension of four, which couple the two theories in a nontrivial way. While the Wilson–Fisher fixed point remains completely unaffected, a mismatch of time scales destabilizes the usual DP fixed point, suggesting a crossover to a first-order transition from the active (surviving) to the inactive (extinct) state.