Abstract
The natural historical literature contains a considerable body of work which indicates that harvesting (or predation) can alleviate competitive instabilities. In order to arrive at an understanding of this, the appropriate bifurcation structure for a rather general family of two-dimensional competitive systems is here investigated. The results of this analysis suggest that, in more complicated ecosystems with many competing species, (1) there is a good chance that harvesting at moderate rates will increase species diversity if one species is dominant in the unharvested system, while an increase in diversity is not likely to result from harvesting from a system with no dominant species, (2) whenever harvesting does increase species diversity, maximal diversity will occur at moderate harvesting rates, with less diversity at both very high and very low harvesting rates.
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Yodzis, P. The effects of harvesting on competitive systems. Bltn Mathcal Biology 38, 97–109 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02471750
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02471750