Seasonal reproduction leads to population collapse and an Allee effect in a stage-structured consumer-resource biomass model when mortality rate increases.

ABSTRACT: Many populations collapse suddenly when reaching low densities even if they have abundant food conditions, a phenomenon known as an Allee effect. Such collapses can have disastrous consequences, for example, for loss of biodiversity. In this paper, we formulate a stage-structured consumer-resource biomass model in which adults only reproduce at the beginning of each growing season, and investigate the effect of an increasing stage-independent background mortality rate of the consumer. As the main difference with previously studied continuous-time models, seasonal reproduction can result in an Allee effect and consumer population collapses at high consumer mortality rate. However, unlike the mechanisms reported in the literature, in our model the Allee effect results from the time differenc

SUBMITTER: Sun Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5663510 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature