Figure 1.

Alternative depictions of evolutionary rescue. Probability distributions of (a) population sizes, (b) median population sizes and (c) extinction probabilities at five successive future times for a hypothetical population of initial size 10. Mean population sizes are indicated by vertical dashed lines in panel (a). On the basis of 10 000 realizations, implemented in the R statistical language [26], of a branching process model that assumes each individual leaves a binomially distributed number of offspring with parameters p = 1/2 and N = 1, 1, 2, 3, 3 at the successive time steps, which correspond to mean absolute fitnesses (finite growth rates) of 0.5, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 and 1.5, respectively.