Resilience analysis for competing populations (Q2008247)

The term ecological resilience means the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations. The authors consider a competing population model as modeled by the classical Lotka-Volterra system. The bistable scenario is in the context of high interspecific competition in which one population is considered as native and the other as invader. The techniques of the qualitative theory of differential equations are applied to study the resilience of the considered model. The method characterizes analytically an invariant manifold of a saddle point as the graph of a smooth function. It characterizes its behavior in terms of the model parameters. The authors give results which provide a way to quantify two resilience measures, the precariousness and the latitude, for the native population. One interesting aspect of the result is to show how adaptations on the native population behavior may protect it against the invasion of a second population. The paper is quite interesting and gives interesting insights of the considered model.