POPULATION DYNAMICS AND TREE GROWTH STRUCTURE IN MATHEMATICAL ECOLOGY

This thesis is based on four papers related to mathematical biology, where three papers focus on population dynamics and one paper concerns tree growth and stem structure. The first two papers are mainly devoted to studying the dynamics of physiologically structured population models by using Escalator Boxcar Train (EBT) method. The third paper concerns a class of stage-structured population systems, in both deterministic and stochastic settings. The fourth paper explores how a branch thinning model can be utilized to describe the cross-sectional area of the stem of a tree, thus generalizing the classical pipe model. In Paper I, we present a merging procedure to reduce the increasing system of ordinary differential equations generated by the EBT method. In particular, we modify the EBT method to include merging of cohorts. The accuracy of this model is explored on a colony of Daphnia Pulex. In Paper II, we study the convergence rate of the modified EBT model, allowing a general class of non-linear merging procedures. We show that this modified EBT method induces a bounded number of cohorts, independent of the number of time steps. This in turn, improves the speed of the numerical algorithm for solving the population dynamics from polynomial time to linear time, that is, the time consumption to find the solution is proportional to the number of time steps. In Paper III, a class of non-linear two-stage structured population models is studied with different growth rates for the unstructured food resource under different harvesting rates in both deterministic and stochastic settings. In the stochastic setting, we develop methods to evaluate emergent properties equivalent to the properties investigated in the deterministic case. In addition, new emergent properties, e.g. probability of extinction, are also investigated. In Paper IV, we explore the stem model which is developed by combining the pipe model and the branch thinning model. The stem model provides estimates of the heartwood, sapwood and stem cross-sectional area at any height. We corroborate the accuracy of our model with empirical data and the cross validation of our results shows a very high goodness of fit for the stem model