Speaker
Description
Many ecological management problems involve allocating limited resources across the life stages of populations in order to influence population growth. Such problems arise in both invasive species control and conservation of threatened species, yet these objectives are often studied within separate modeling frameworks. We consider a general stage-structured formulation for univoltine populations in which management interventions modify stage-specific demographic rates. The resulting growth function provides a common representation of both suppression strategies, which reduce demographic rates, and enhancement strategies, which increase them. Analysis of this framework highlights differences in how interventions applied to different life stages interact within the growth process. These interaction patterns influence how marginal intervention effects change as effort accumulates and therefore affect prioritization and switching behavior when allocating management effort, particularly when interventions exhibit diminishing returns. The framework provides a general basis for studying stage-specific intervention strategies in both population suppression and conservation contexts.
