Abstract
Ecologists have recently used integral projection models (IPMs) to study fish and other animals which continue to grow throughout their lives. Such animals cannot shrink, since they have bony skeletons; a mathematical consequence of this is that the kernel of the integral projection operator T is unbounded, and the operator is not compact. To our knowledge, all theoretical work done on IPMs has assumed the operator is compact, and in particular has a bounded kernel. A priori, it is unclear whether these IPMs have an asymptotic growth rate \(\lambda \), or a stable-stage distribution \(\psi \). In the case of a compact operator, these quantities are its spectral radius and the associated eigenvector, respectively. Under biologically reasonable assumptions, we prove that the non-compact operators in these IPMs share some important traits with their compact counterparts: the operator T has a unique positive eigenvector \(\psi \) corresponding to its spectral radius \(\lambda \), this \(\lambda \) is strictly greater than the supremum of the modulus of all other spectral values, and for any nonnegative initial population \(\varphi _0\), there is a \(c>0\) such that \(T^n\varphi _0/\lambda ^n \rightarrow c \cdot \psi \).
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Acknowledgements
Richard Rebarber and Matt Reichenbach were partially supported by National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences Grant 141259. Brigitte Tenhumberg was supported by USDA–NIFA Grant 2017-03807, and the U.S. National Science Foundation (DEB 1655117). We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, whose suggestions and constructive comments have greatly improved the quality of this paper.
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Reichenbach, M., Rebarber, R. & Tenhumberg, B. Spectral properties of a non-compact operator in ecology. J. Math. Biol. 82, 50 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-021-01600-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-021-01600-7
Keywords
- Population dynamics
- Indeterminate growth
- Integral projection models
- Positive operators
- Essential spectrum
- Perron–Frobenius theorem
- Measures of non-compactness