The Use of a Kernel Ecological System in a Multi Species Predator-Prey Model and Climate Change Impact on Biodiversity

The interaction of multiple species of animals in an ecological system is modeled by first reducing the ecological system to a kernel ecological system consisting of keystone species and top predators in the environment through Graph Theory. From the reduced kernel ecological system of keystone species, a system of Lotka-Volterra differential equations is used to describe the predator-prey relationships that exist. The equations for the number of organism per species were derived and additive environmental stochasticity or noise is added to each equation. The noise is assumed to come from an extreme value distribution or Gumbel distribution to reflect the impact of extreme weather conditions on the population dynamics of the entire ecological system. Results reveal a rich dynamical behavior for the system which otherwise would not have been revealed by straight application of deterministic predator-prey models.

 

Keywords - predator, prey, graph theory, Lotka-Volterra, multi-species model, stochastic model