Recognizing and prevention of probable regime shift in density regulated and Allee type stochastic harvesting model with application to herring conservation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how to prevent catastrophic regime shifts in stochastic ecological models, specifically for herring populations, by using manual control strategies to avoid extinction in bi-stable systems.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic modeling approach with control strategies to prevent regime shifts and extinction in density regulated and Allee effect models, applied to herring conservation.

Findings

Manual control of handling time can prevent regime shifts.

Stochastic models show potential for extinction avoidance.

Application to real herring data demonstrates practical relevance.

Abstract

An ecological system with multiple stable equilibria is prone to undergo catastrophic change or regime shift from one steady-state to another. It should be noted that, if one of the steady states is an extinction state, the catastrophic change may lead to extinction. A suitable manual measure may control the prevention of catastrophic changes of different species from one equilibrium to another. We consider two stochastic models with linear and nonlinear harvesting terms. We inspect either density regulation or Allee type density regulated models [Saha et al., Ecological Modelling, 2013], which have substantial applications in the herring fish population's viability study. Both the deterministic models we consider here contain bi-stability under certain restrictions, and in that case, one of the stable states is the extinction state. We assume that the dynamical system under consideration is closed, i.e., immigration and emigration are absent. The demographic noise is introduced in the system by substituting an ordinary differential equation with a stochastic differential equation model, where the birth and death rates of the deterministic process are used to obtain the instantaneous mean and variance in the stochastic differential equation. Our study reveals that, the catastrophic changes can be avoided manually by a suitable choice of handling time that will eventually help to prevent the sudden extinction of the harvested population. The entire study is illustrated through the herring population size data obtained from the Global Population Dynamics Database (GPDD) and simulation experiment.