Simplifying a physiologically structured population model to a stage-structured biomass model

M. De Roos, André, Tim Schellekens, Tobias Van Kooten, Karen Van De Wolfshaar, David Claessen and Lennart Persson

Theoretical Population Biology, 2008, vol. 73, issue 1, 47-62

Abstract: We formulate and analyze an archetypal consumer–resource model in terms of ordinary differential equations that consistently translates individual life history processes, in particular food-dependent growth in body size and stage-specific differences between juveniles and adults in resource use and mortality, to the population level. This stage-structured model is derived as an approximation to a physiologically structured population model, which accounts for a complete size-distribution of the consumer population and which is based on assumptions about the energy budget and size-dependent life history of individual consumers. The approximation ensures that under equilibrium conditions predictions of both models are completely identical. In addition we find that under non-equilibrium conditions the stage-structured model gives rise to dynamics that closely approximate the dynamics exhibited by the size-structured model, as long as adult consumers are superior foragers than juveniles with a higher mass-specific ingestion rate. When the mass-specific intake rate of juvenile consumers is higher, the size-structured model exhibits single-generation cycles, in which a single cohort of consumers dominates population dynamics throughout its life time and the population composition varies over time between a dominance by juveniles and adults, respectively. The stage-structured model does not capture these dynamics because it incorporates a distributed time delay between the birth and maturation of an individual organism in contrast to the size-structured model, in which maturation is a discrete event in individual life history. We investigate model dynamics with both semi-chemostat and logistic resource growth.

Keywords: Stage-structured model; Food-dependent individual growth; Population size-structure; Consumer–resource; Population dynamics; Archetypal model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580907001049
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:thpobi:v:73:y:2008:i:1:p:47-62

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2007.09.004

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve

More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().