Stabilizing biological populations and metapopulations by Adaptive Limiter Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces Adaptive Limiter Control (ALC), a practical method to stabilize biological populations and metapopulations, reducing extinction risks and fluctuations, demonstrated through experiments with Drosophila and supported by simulations.

Contribution

The paper presents ALC, a new, easily implementable stabilization method effective across various species and population models, addressing a gap in practical population management techniques.

Findings

ALC reduces population size fluctuations and synchrony.

ALC effectively stabilizes laboratory Drosophila populations.

Simulation results support broad applicability of ALC.

Abstract

Despite great interest in techniques for stabilizing the dynamics of biological populations and metapopulations, very few practicable methods have been developed. We propose an easily implementable method, Adaptive Limiter Control (ALC), for reducing extinction frequencies and the magnitude of fluctuation in population sizes and demonstrate its efficacy in stabilizing laboratory populations and metapopulations of Drosophila melanogaster. Metapopulation stability was attained through a combination of reduced size fluctuations and synchrony at the subpopulation level. Simulations indicated that ALC was effective over a wide range of maximal population growth rates, migration rates and population dynamics models. Since simulations using widely applicable, nonspecies-specific models of population dynamics were able to capture most features of the experimental data, we expect our results to be applicable to a wide range of species.