Planting and harvesting for pioneer-climax models (Q1335223)

We try to model the effects of population density on the survival and growth of an individual species by assuming that the species' per capita growth rate (i.e., fitness) is a function of a weighted total density variable. This total density variable is a linear combination of the densities of the interacting species with coefficients weighting the intensity of the effect of each species. An example of such a model is the Lotka-Volterra system where the per capita growth rate is just a linear combination of the densities of the interacting populations. Section 2 discusses the background for pioneer-climax systems. Section 3 describes the destabilizing effect of varying the intraspecific crowding parameters. Section 4 compares the asymptotic behavior for constant rate and periodic rate planting. Section 5 gives conditions for which planting of a linear or an exponential pioneer will return the system to a near- equilibrium condition. And Section 6 proves the averaging results needed in Section 4. The averaging theorems are proved for general \(C^ 1\) vector fields in the plane.