The spatial dynamics of ecosystem engineers
Caroline Franco, Jos\'e F. Fontanari

TL;DR
This paper models the population dynamics of ecosystem engineers, organisms that modify their habitats, incorporating abiotic interactions and dispersal, revealing how dispersal can suppress chaos and prevent extinctions.
Contribution
It introduces a spatially explicit, discrete model of ecosystem engineers that accounts for habitat modification and dispersal, highlighting their impact on population stability.
Findings
Dispersal influences metapopulation dynamics mainly in chaotic regimes.
Dispersal can suppress chaos and prevent extinctions.
Habitat modification is crucial for understanding population dynamics.
Abstract
The changes on abiotic features of ecosystems have rarely been taken into account by population dynamics models, which typically focus on trophic and competitive interactions between species. However, understanding the population dynamics of organisms that must modify their habitats in order to survive, the so-called ecosystem engineers, requires the explicit incorporation of abiotic interactions in the models. Here we study a model of ecosystem engineers that is discrete both in space and time, and where the engineers and their habitats are arranged in patches fixed to the sites of regular lattices. The growth of the engineer population is modeled by Ricker equation with a density-dependent carrying capacity that is given by the number of modified habitats. A diffusive dispersal stage ensures that a fraction of the engineers move from their birth patches to neighboring patches. We find…
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