Identifying non-invasible habitats for marine copepods using temperature-dependent R 0

Abstract

If a non-indigenous species is to thrive and become invasive it must first persist under its new set of environmental conditions. Net reproductive rate (R 0) represents the average number of female offspring produced by a female over its lifetime, and has been used as a metric of population persistence. We modeled R 0 as a function of ambient water temperature (T) for the invasive marine calanoid copepod Pseudodiaptomus marinus, which is introduced to west coast of North America from East Asia by ship ballast water. The model was based on temperature-dependent stage-structured population dynamics given by a system of ordinary differential equations. We proposed a methodology to identify habitats that are non-invasible for P. marinus using the threshold of R 0(T) < 1 in order to identify potentially invasible habitats. We parameterized the model using published data on P. marinus and applied R 0(T) to identify the range of non-invasible habitats in a global scale based on sea surface temperature data. The model predictions matched the field evidence of species occurrences well.