Interplay of harvesting and the growth rate for spatially diversified populations and the testing of a decoupled scheme

Abstract

The loss and degradation of habitat, Allee effects, climate change, deforestation, huntingoverfishing and human disturbances are alarming and significant threats to the extinction of many species in ecology. When populations compete for natural resources, food supply and habitat, survival to extinction and various other issues are visible. This paper investigates the competition of two species in a heterogeneous environment that are subject to the effect of harvesting. The most realistic harvesting case is connected with the intrinsic growth rate, and the harvesting functions are developed based on this clause instead of random choice. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the model. Theoretically, we state that, when species coexist, one may drive the other to die out, so both species become extinct, considering all possible rational values of parameters. These results highlight a worthy-of attention study between two populations based on harvesting coefficients. Finally, we solve the model for two spatial dimensions by using a backward Euler, decoupled and linearized timestepping fully discrete algorithm in a series of examples and observe a match between the theoretical and numerical findings.