Co-existence thresholds in the dynamics of the plant–herbivore interaction with Allee effect and harvest

Abstract

In the interaction between plants and herbivores that live in the same ecosystem, understanding the conditions in which co-existence equilibrium occurs answers a major question in Ecology. In this interaction, plants serve as food for herbivores on the food chain. Then the livelihood of herbivores highly depends on the availability of food, in this case the availability of plants. Moreover, the abundance of the plant density alone does not guarantee the non-extinction of the herbivore population as they are assumed to reproduce sexually. With this motivation, in this paper a predator–prey mathematical model is reformulated such that the death rate of the herbivore population is dependent on the plant density and their emergence is also governed by the Allee effect. Using the mathematical theory of dynamical system, threshold conditions are obtained for the non-extinction of the herbivore population and a trapping region is obtained to ensure co-existence of the population. Moreover, it has been shown that the dynamics of the population is significantly sensitive to the feeding rate and the harvest rate of the herbivore population.