Special Session 15: Recent Advances on Population Models in Ecology and Epidemiology
Maximizing Metapopulation Growth Rate and Biomass in Stream Networks
Tung D Nguyen
Texas A&M University USA
Co-Author(s): Y. Wu, A. Veprauskas, T. Tang, Y. Zhou, C. Beckford, B. Chau, X. Chen, B. D. Rouhani, Y. Wu, Y. Yang, Z. Shuai
Abstract:
We consider the logistic metapopulation model over a stream network and use the metapopulation growth rate and the total biomass of the positive equilibrium as measures for population persistence. Our objective is to find distributions of resources that maximize these persistence measures. We begin our study by considering stream networks consisting of three nodes and prove that the strategy to maximize the total biomass is to concentrate all the resources in the most upstream locations. In contrast, when the diffusion rates are sufficiently small, the metapopulation growth rate is maximized when all resources are concentrated in one of the most downstream locations. These two main results are generalized to stream networks with any number of patches.