Effect of human interaction on forest-grassland dynamics: a numerical bifurcation analysis

Many ecosytems are characterized by multistability and/or oscillating regimes. Sudden shifts between states may emerge due to external disturbances and/or human intervention. Thus understanding how disturbances and human interaction influence the dynamics of ecosystems is very important for the prevention and control of ecological catastrophic shifts which may manifest as “sudden” phase transitions towards undesirable states. Examples of such ecosystems are the forest-grassland mosaic ecosystems. Thus, human preference and consequent actions have a direct effect on these transitions. Thus, understanding how the stability of such systems is affected by external perturbations and human intervention is of primary importance for their management and urban design. In this work we perform a one and two parameter numerical bifurcation analysis of a forest-grassland ecosystem model which includes human inference. Our numerical analysis reveals that this simple model is able to approximate complex nonlinear behaviour including multistability and oscillations with shifts characterized by both catastrophic and smooth transitions including Bautin bifurcations.