A Continuous Model for the Ecological Collapse of Easter Island

摘要

In this article a mathematical model describing the possible events that could have lead to the ecological catastrophe of Easter Island is extended in a way that instead of the originally spatially discrete model (the domain is split into several regions) now a spatially continuous one is considered (the number of each population is observed at each point of the domain). In other words, the original system of ordinary differential equations is transformed into a system of partial differential equations, and then the effect of the diffusion of the trees is observed, i.e. whether it stabilizes the system like in the original case, or not. It turned out that because the linearized system can be written in a pretty similar form to the matrix of the two dimensional case which was examined in a previous article [10], the same theorems can be said about this system, meaning that the increase of the diffusion of the trees actually stabilizes the system in this case too.