Interaction between Allee effects caused by organism-environment feedback and by other ecological mechanisms

Abstract

Understanding Allee effect has crucial importance for ecological conservation and management because it is strongly related to population extinction. Due to various ecological mechanisms accounting for Allee effect, it is necessary to study the influence of multiple Allee effects on the dynamics and persistence of population. We here focus on organism-environment feedback which can incur strong, weak, and fatal Allee effect (AE-by-OEF), and further examine their interaction with the Allee effects caused by other ecological mechanisms (AE-by-OM). The results show that multiple Allee effects largely increase the extinction risk of population either due to the enlargement of Allee threshold or the change of inherent characteristic of Allee effect, and such an increase will be enhanced dramatically with increasing the strength of individual Allee effects. Our simulations explicitly considering spatial structure also demonstrate that local interaction among habitat patches can greatly mitigate such superimposed Allee effects as well as individual Allee effect. This implies that spatially structurized habitat could play an important role in ecological conservation and management.

Deterministic and Stochastic Research of Cubic Population Model with Harvesting

“…Allee effect was first described by Warder Clyde Allee in the 1930's [7,8]. Despite its long history, it is still a current research topic in the fields of evolutionary biology and genetics [9][10][11][12]. Allee effect is a positive correlation between population density and mean individual fitness [13][14][15].…”

Invariant manifolds and global bifurcations to find multiple wave solutions in a reaction-diffusion system

“…Let us give a brief overview of these two features. The Allee effect [56] is a phenomenon that may affect a species at low population densities, sometimes even related to the emergence of extinction risks. At low densities, predators can induce a phenomenon called the Allee effect by predation affecting the prey species [28,30].…”

“…Since the Allee effect is related to population extinction, an understanding of this phenomenon is very relevant for ecological administration and conservation [56]. Many studies have been carried out in this regard, as can be seen in [4,18,21,56].…”

Effect of harvest on MTE calculated by single step process for stochastic population model under Allee effect

“…In recent years, there has been much interest in investigating the different characteristics of the Allee effect in both ecology, evolutionary biology and genetics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Allee effect can be defined as positive correlation between population density and mean individual fitness [9].…”