The effects of reducing mating likelihood on population viability

Abstract:

The success a species may have invading a patch previously unoccupied is of considerable interest for pest managers and conservation ecologists. The purpose here is to present a mechanistic approach to analyze reproductive Allee effects appearing through the failure in the process of fertilization in a two-sex population and observe how the survival in an invaded patch is affected. This is in contrast to the usually employed stochastic models with a deterministic skeleton that describe the presence of Allee effects. A Poisson-Ricker model, which includes stochastic demography and sex determination with females classified as successfully fertilized or not fertilized, is used. Numerical approximations to the probabilities of extinction and the mean time to extinction are presented, for fixed parameter values, suggesting how stochasticity in the mating process combined with random fluctuations in the male and female densities, at each generation, contribute to the risk of extinction of a population which started an invasion at a low density. Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Año de publicación:

2011

Keywords:

• Population viability
• Poisson-Ricker model
• Reproductive Alle effect
• Probability of fertilization

Fuente:

scopus