title: Impact of seasonal forcing on reactive ecological systems.
abstract: Our focus is on the short-term dynamics of reactive ecological systems which are stable in the long term. In these systems, perturbations can exhibit significant transient amplifications before asymptotically decaying. This peculiar behavior has attracted increasing attention. However, reactive systems have so far been investigated assuming that external environmental characteristics remain constant, although environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, moisture, water availability, etc.) can undergo substantial changes due to seasonal cycles. In order to fill this gap, we propose applying the adjoint non-modal analysis to study the impact of seasonal variations of environmental conditions on reactive systems. This tool allows the transient dynamics of a perturbation affecting non-autonomous ecological systems to be described. To show the potential of this approach, a seasonally forced prey-predator model with a Holling II type functional response is studied as an exemplifying case. We demonstrate that seasonalities can greatly affect the transient dynamics of the system.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, C.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy. Electronic address: riccardo.vesipa@polito.it.
authors.forename: Riccardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vesipa
authors.affiliation: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, C.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy.
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ridolfi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D017753:Ecosystem; D020387:Food Chain; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011156:Population Density; D011157:Population Dynamics; D011235:Predatory Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D012621:Seasons; D013696:Temperature; D014867:Water
chemical_list: D014867:Water
keywords: Non-modal analysis; Prey-predator dynamics; Reactivity; Seasonality