Population boundary across an environmental gradient: Effects of quenched disorder

Population boundary is a classic indicator of climatic response in ecology. In addition to known challenges, the spatial and dynamical characteristics of the boundary are not only affected by the spatial gradient in the environmental factors, but also by local heterogeneities in the regional characteristics. Here, we capture the effects of quenched heterogeneities on the ecological boundary with the disordered contact process in one and two dimensions with a linear spatial trend in the local control parameter. We apply the strong-disorder renormalization-group method to calculate the sites occupied with an O(1) probability in the stationary state, readily yielding the population front's position as the outermost site locally as well as globally for the entire boundary. We show that under a quasistatic change of the global environment, mimicking climate change, the front advances intermittently: long quiescent periods are interrupted by rare but long jumps. The characteristics of this intermittent dynamics are found to obey universal scaling laws in terms of the gradient, conjectured to be related to the correlation-length exponent of the model. Our results suggest that current observations might misleadingly show little to no climate response for an extended period of time, concealing the long-term effects of climate change.