https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06253-9
Regular Article
Impacts of refuge and additional foods on the spatiotemporal dynamics of a prey-predator system in a time-periodic environment
1
School of Life and Environmental Science, Wenzhou University, 325035, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China
2
National & Local Joint Engineering Research Center for Ecological Treatment Technology of Urban Water Pollution, Wenzhou University, 325035, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China
3
Environmental Engineering Program, University of Northern British Columbia, V2N 4Z9, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada
4
School of Mathematics and Physics, Wenzhou University, 325035, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China
5
Department of Basic Science and Humanities, Indian Institute of Information Technology, 813210, Bhagalpur, India
Received:
12
December
2024
Accepted:
23
March
2025
Published online:
22
April
2025
In this investigation, we study the dynamics of a diffusive prey-predator system in a time-periodic environment, incorporating prey refuge and supplementary food resources for predators. We establish solution’s boundedness, and derive the conditions for population persistence and extinction. We find that whenever both prey and predator populations persist, a unique periodic solution arises that is globally asymptotically stable. Our numerical results show that increasing prey refuge (or alternative food) stabilizes the system, shifting it from oscillatory behavior to stable coexistence. However, excessive alternative food availability can drive prey species to extinction, leaving predator as the sole surviving species. Further, we observe that a time-periodic environment significantly affects oscillatory patterns, driving transitions between uniform bulk oscillations and oscillating Turing patterns. Overall, our study highlights the crucial influence of time-periodic environmental factors on prey-predator dynamics, considering prey refuge and additional food for predators, and stresses the need to account for such variability in ecological systems.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
