Interaction between Allee effects caused by organism-environment feedback and by other ecological mechanisms

Understanding Allee effect has crucial importance for ecological conservation and management because it is strongly related to population extinction. Due to various ecological mechanisms accounting for Allee effect, it is necessary to study the influence of multiple Allee effects on the dynamics and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2017-03, Vol.12 (3), p.e0174141-e0174141
Main Authors: Qin, Lijuan, Zhang, Feng, Wang, Wanxiong, Song, Weixin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Allee effect
Animals
Applied mathematics
Biology
Biology and Life Sciences
Computer and Information Sciences
Conservation
Conservation of Natural Resources
Ecological effects
Ecological monitoring
Ecology
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Endangered & extinct species
Enlargement
Environment
Environmental aspects
Environmental science
Epidemics
Extinction
Extinction (Astronomy)
Feedback
Feedback, Physiological
Fish
Habitats
Herbivores
Models, Theoretical
Neighborhoods
Physical Sciences
Population Density
Population Dynamics
Probability
Species extinction
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Summary:Understanding Allee effect has crucial importance for ecological conservation and management because it is strongly related to population extinction. Due to various ecological mechanisms accounting for Allee effect, it is necessary to study the influence of multiple Allee effects on the dynamics and persistence of population. We here focus on organism-environment feedback which can incur strong, weak, and fatal Allee effect (AE-by-OEF), and further examine their interaction with the Allee effects caused by other ecological mechanisms (AE-by-OM). The results show that multiple Allee effects largely increase the extinction risk of population either due to the enlargement of Allee threshold or the change of inherent characteristic of Allee effect, and such an increase will be enhanced dramatically with increasing the strength of individual Allee effects. Our simulations explicitly considering spatial structure also demonstrate that local interaction among habitat patches can greatly mitigate such superimposed Allee effects as well as individual Allee effect. This implies that spatially structurized habitat could play an important role in ecological conservation and management.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0174141