Branching processes in varying environment with generation-dependent immigration

Abstract

A branching process in varying environment with generation-dependent immigration is a modification of the standard branching process in which immigration is allowed and the reproduction and immigration laws may vary over the generations. This flexibility makes the process more appropriate to model real populations due to the fact that the stability in the reproductive capacity and in the immigration laws are not usually fulfilled. In this setting, we study the extinction problem, providing a necessary and sufficient condition for the certain extinction of the population. The asymptotic behaviour of the model is analysed for those processes with critical offspring distributions and when the immigration means stabilize to a positive value. More specifically, we establish that the asymptotic distribution of the process -under a suitable normalization- belongs to the gamma distribution family.