Role of limiting dispersal on metacommunity stability and persistence

TL;DR

This study investigates how limiting dispersal in prey-predator metacommunities affects their stability and persistence, revealing that controlled dispersal can enhance metacommunity resilience through complex bifurcation dynamics.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into how limiting dispersal influences stability and persistence in metacommunities, including bifurcation analysis and applicability to complex networks.

Findings

Limiting predator dispersal decreases inhomogeneous steady state spread.

Optimal limiting prey dispersal enhances metacommunity persistence.

Bifurcation curves align with simulation results.

Abstract

The role of dispersal on the stability and synchrony of a metacommunity is a topic of considerable interest in theoretical ecology. Dispersal is known to promote both synchrony, which enhances the likelihood of extinction, and spatial heterogeneity, which favors the persistence of the population. Several efforts have been made to understand the effect of diverse variants of dispersal in the spatially distributed ecological community. Despite the environmental change strongly affect the dispersal, the effects of controlled dispersal on the metacommunity stability and their persistence remain unknown. We study the influence of limiting the immigration using two patch prey-predator metacommunity at both local and spatial scales. We find that the spread of the inhomogeneous stable steady states (asynchronous states) decreases monotonically upon limiting the predator dispersal. Nevertheless, at the local scale, the spread of the inhomogeneous steady states increases up to a critical value of the limiting factor, favoring the metacommunity persistence, and then starts decreasing for further decrease in the limiting factor with varying local interaction. Interestingly, limiting the prey dispersal promotes inhomogeneous steady states in a large region of the parameter space, thereby increasing the metacommunity persistence both at spatial and local scales. Further, we show similar qualitative dynamics in an entire class of complex networks consisting of a large number of patches. We also deduce various bifurcation curves and stability condition for the inhomogeneous steady states, which we find to agree well with the simulation results. Thus, our findings on the effect of the limiting dispersal can help to develop conservation measures for ecological community.