Dynamics of a stoichiometric producer-grazer system with seasonal effects on light level (Q2160586)

Population systems are subject to seasonally varying environments. As a result, many species exhibit seasonal changes in their life-history parameters. It is quite natural to try to understand how seasonal forcing affects population dynamics subject to stoichiometric constraints, such as nutrient/light availability and food quality. This paper formulated the stoichiometric prey-predator model more mechanistically by modeling the seasonal variation of the producer's light-dependent carrying capacity, which is a system of two non-autonomous and non-smooth ordinary differential equations. Bifurcation analysis of the model with respect to average value of light-dependent carrying capacity was done and the effects of different amplitudes of seasonal forcing on the dynamics of the model were also investigated. Through the bifurcation analysis, it was observed that seasonal forcing can lead to complicated population dynamics, including periodic and quasi-periodic solutions.