Natural enemies deployment in patchy environments for augmentative biological control

Bapan Ghosh, Frédéric Grognard and Ludovic Mailleret

Applied Mathematics and Computation, 2015, vol. 266, issue C, 982-999

Abstract: Biological control is an important tool for ecologically friendly crop protection against pests, that consists in using a biological organism (predator, parasitoid, pathogen) to reduce the population density of the targeted pest. We examine the effectiveness of periodic impulsive releases of biocontrol agents (beneficial species) into a two-patch environment through mathematical modeling. In this paper, we consider a spatio-temporal Lotka–Volterra pest–predator system defined over two patches. We show that the threshold predator release rate guaranteeing the stability of the pest-free solution is actually independent of the release period when predators in both patches follow balanced dynamics or pests do not disperse. Otherwise, the stability threshold becomes period-dependent and more specifically it is an increasing function of the release period. This implies that the deployment of biological control agents at a given release rate can possibly succeed if releases are frequent and small and fail otherwise. In the various cases we also show what the optimal strategy is that minimizes the total release rate or how to spread a given release rate between the two patches.

Keywords: Impulsive control; Biological control; Semi-discrete systems; Predator–prey model; Two-patch model; Dispersal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0096300315008024
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:apmaco:v:266:y:2015:i:c:p:982-999

DOI: 10.1016/j.amc.2015.06.021

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Mathematics and Computation is currently edited by Theodore Simos

More articles in Applied Mathematics and Computation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().