Impacts of demographic and environmental stochasticity on population dynamics with cooperative effects

Abstract

Different types of stochasticity play essential roles in shaping complex population dynamics. This paper presents a novel approach to model demographic and environmental stochasticity in a single-species model with cooperative components that are measured by component Allee effects. Our work provides rigorous mathematical proof on stochastic persistence and extinction, ergodicity (i.e., the existence of a unique stationary distribution) and the existence of a nontrivial periodic solution to study the impacts of demographic and environmental stochasticity on population dynamics. The theoretical and numerical results suggest that stochasticity may affect the population system in a variety of ways, specifically: (i) In the weak Allee effects case (e.g., strong cooperative efforts), the demographic stochasticity from the attack rate contributes to the expansion of the population size, while the demographic stochasticity from the handling rate and the environmental stochasticity have the opposite role, and may even lead to population extinction; (ii) In the strong Allee effects case (cooperative efforts not strong enough), both demographic and environmental stochasticity play a similar role in the survival of population, and are related to the initial population level: if the initial population level is large enough, demographic stochasticity and environmental stochasticity may be detrimental to the survival of population, otherwise if the initial population level is small enough, demographic stochasticity and environmental stochasticity may bring survival opportunities for the population that deterministically would extinct indefinitely; (iii) In the extinction case, demographic and environmental stochasticity cannot change the trend of population extinction, but they can delay or promote population extinction.