Quantifying invasibility

Invasibility, the chance of a population to grow from rarity and become established, plays a fundamental role in population genetics, ecology, epidemiology and evolution. For many decades, the mean growth rate of a species when it is rare has been employed as an invasion criterion. Recent studies show that the mean growth rate fails as a quantitative metric for invasibility, with its magnitude sometimes even increasing while the invasibility decreases. Here we provide two novel formulae, based on the diffusion approximation and a large-deviations (Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin) approach, for the chance of invasion given the mean growth and its variance. The first formula has the virtue of simplicity, while the second one holds over a wider parameter range. The efficacy of the formulae, including their accompanying data analysis technique, is demonstrated using synthetic time series generated from canonical models and parameterised with empirical data.