PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 112: Evolutionary Ecology: Invasion Dynamics; Populations; Communities
Thursday, August 11, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 514 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Spatiotemporal complexity of invasive pattern formation and their ecological implication.

Li, Bai-Lian¹, Petrovskii, Sergei¹, Morozov, Andrew¹, ¹ Ecological Complexity and Modeling Lab, Riverside, California, USA

ABSTRACT- Biological invasion has become a challenge and hot issue in ecology. Understanding the complexity of spatiotemporal pattern formation of exotic species invasion is an important step for developing any useful management strategies of controlling invasive species. Here we consider spatiotemporal dynamics of a predator-prey system under the assumption that prey growth is damped by the strong Allee effect. Mathematically, the model consists of two coupled diffusion-reaction equations. The initial conditions are described by functions of finite support which corresponds to invasion of exotic species. By means of extensive numerical simulations, we identify the main scenarios of the system dynamics as related to biological invasion. We construct the maps in the parameter space of the system with different domains corresponding to different invasion regimes and show that the impact of the Allee effect essentially increases the system spatiotemporal complexity. In particular, we show that, as a result of the interplay between Allee effect and predation, successful establishment of exotic species may not necessarily lead to geographical spread and geographical spread does not always enhance regional persistence of invading species.

Key words: Spatiotemporal complexity of pattern formation, Biological invasion, Predator-prey system, Allee effect