Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics Commons^™

Optimal Control Of Species Augmentation Conservation Strategies, Erin Nicole Bodine

Doctoral Dissertations

Species augmentation is a method of reducing species loss via augmenting declining or threatened populations with individuals from captive-bred or stable, wild populations. In this dissertation, species augmentation is analyzed in an optimal control setting to determine the optimal augmentation strategies given various constraints and settings. In each setting, we consider the effects on both the target/endangered population and a reserve population from which the individuals translocated in the augmentation are harvested. Four different optimal control formulations are explored. The first two optimal control formulations model the underlying population dynamics with a system of ordinary differential equations. Each of these …