  A vertex-subset graph problem Q defines which subsets of the vertices of an
input graph are feasible solutions. A reconfiguration variant of a
vertex-subset problem asks, given two feasible solutions S and T of size k,
whether it is possible to transform S into T by a sequence of vertex additions
and deletions such that each intermediate set is also a feasible solution of
size bounded by k. We study reconfiguration variants of two classical
vertex-subset problems, namely Independent Set and Dominating Set. We denote
the former by ISR and the latter by DSR. Both ISR and DSR are PSPACE-complete
on graphs of bounded bandwidth and W[1]-hard parameterized by k on general
graphs. We show that ISR is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by k when
the input graph is of bounded degeneracy or nowhere-dense. As a corollary, we
answer positively an open question concerning the parameterized complexity of
the problem on graphs of bounded treewidth. Moreover, our techniques generalize
recent results showing that ISR is fixed-parameter tractable on planar graphs
and graphs of bounded degree. For DSR, we show the problem fixed-parameter
tractable parameterized by k when the input graph does not contain large
bicliques, a class of graphs which includes graphs of bounded degeneracy and
nowhere-dense graphs.
