Functional limit theorem for branching processes in nearly degenerate varying environment

Abstract: We investigate branching processes in nearly degenerate varying environment, where the offspring distribution converges to the degenerate distribution at 1. Such processes die out almost surely, therefore, we condition on non-extinction or add inhomogeneous immigration. Extending our one-dimensional limit results we derive functional limit theorems. In the former case, the limiting process is a time-changed simple birth-and-death process on $(-\infty, 0]$ conditioned on survival at $0$, while in the latter, it is a time-changed stationary continuous time branching process with immigration.