Fecundity regulation in a spatial birth-and-death process

Abstract

We study a Markov birth-and-death process on a space of locally finite configurations, which describes an ecological model with a density-dependent fecundity regulation mechanism. We establish existence and uniqueness of this process and analyze its properties. In particular, we show global time-space boundedness of the population density and, using a constructed Foster–Lyapunov-type function, we study return times to certain level sets of tempered configurations. We also find sufficient conditions that the degenerate invariant distribution is unique for the considered process.