R0 Analysis of a Spatiotemporal Model for a Stream Population

Water resources worldwide require management to meet industrial, agricultural, and urban consumption needs. Management actions change the natural flow regime, which impacts the river ecosystem. Water managers are tasked with meeting water needs while mitigating ecosystem impacts. We develop process-oriented advection-diffusion-reaction equations that couple hydraulic flow to population growth, and we analyze them to assess the effect of water flow on population persistence. We present a new mathematical framework, based on the net reproductive rate R0 for advection-diffusion-reaction equations and on related measures. We apply the measures to population persistence in rivers under various flow regimes. This work lays the groundwork for connecting R0 to more complex models of spatially structured and interacting populations, as well as more detailed habitat and hydrological data.