Enhancing Population Persistence by a Protection Zone in a Reaction-Diffusion Model with Strong Allee Effect

Abstract: Protecting endangered species has been an important issue in ecology. We derive a reaction-diffusion model for a population in a one-dimensional bounded habitat, where the population is subjected to a strong Allee effect in its natural domain but obeys a logistic growth in a protection zone. We establish the conditions for population persistence and extinction via the principal eigenvalue of an associated eigenvalue problem and investigate the dependence of this principal eigenvalue on the location (i.e., the starting point and the length) of the protection zone. The results are used to design the optimal protection zone under different boundary conditions, that is, to suggest the starting point and length of the protection zone with respect to different population growth rate in the protection zone, in order for the population to persist in a long term.