Extinction of multiple populations and a team of Die-out Lyapunov functions

Abstract

The extinction of species is a major problem of concern with a large literature. Our investigation gives insight into when species extinctions must occur, with an emphasis on determining which species might possibly die out and on how fast they die out. We investigate a differential equations model for population interactions with the goal of determining when several species (\ie, coordinates of a bounded solution) must die out or ``go extinct'' and must do so exponentially fast. Typically each coordinate represents the population density of a different species. For our main tool, we create what we call ``die-out'' Lyapunov functions. A given system may have several or many such functions, each of which is a function of a different set of coordinates. That die-out function implies that one of the species in its subset must die out exponentially fast -- for almost every choice of coefficients of the system. We create a ``team'' of die-out functions that work together to show that $k$ species must die, where $k$ is determined separately. Secondly, we present a ``trophic'' condition for generalized Lotka-Volterra systems that guarantees that there is a trapping region that is globally attracting. That implies that all solutions are bounded.