title: Stoichiometric plant-herbivore models and their interpretation.
abstract: The purpose of this note is to mechanistically formulate a mathematically tractable model that specifically deals with the dynamics of plant- herbivore interaction in a closed phosphorus (P)-limiting environment. The key to our approach is the employment of the plant cell P quota and the Droop equation for its growth. Our model takes the simple form of a system of two autonomous ordinary differential equations. It can be shown that our model includes the LKE model (Loladze, Kuang and Elser (2000)) as a special case. Our study reveals that the details of ecological stoichiometry models really matter for quantitative predictions of plant-herbivore dynamics, especially at intermediate ranges of the carrying capacity.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1804. kuang@asu.edu.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kuang
authors.forename: Jef
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huisman
authors.forename: James J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Elser