Evidence from the Food Supply chain suggests that food retailers often exhibit a reluctance to share information with their suppliers even when this benefits both parties. For example, inventory coordination and reduced costs may be realized by adopting appropriate supply chain management technologies such as cooperative planning, forecasting, and replenishment. This behavior is explained by vi...

In recent years, many events related to food and public health, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease), dioxin, bird flu and swine flu, brought the issue of food security to the center of international attention. Many countries established strict rules to ensure the food traceability “from farm to fork” to meet the demand of consumer safety and to ensu...

The synchronous behaviour of interacting communities is studied in this paper. Each community is described by a tritrophic food chain model, and the communities interact through a network with arbitrary topology, composed of patches and migration corridors. The analysis of the local synchronization properties (via the master stability function approach) shows that, if only one species can migra...

This article addresses the sustainable traceability issue in the food supply chain from the sourcing perspective in which consumer willingness to pay for traceability is considered. There are two supplier types: traceable suppliers, which are costly but can carry a precise recall in food safety events, and non-traceable suppliers, which are less expensive but may suffer a higher cost in food sa...

Managers are increasingly aware of the need for science to inform the stewardship of natural lands and resources. If ecologists are to address this need, we must increase the scope of our inferences, while maintaining sufficient resolution and realism to predict trajectories of specific populations or ecosystem variables. Food chain and simple food web models, used either as core or component h...

Khan I., Khan J., Miskeen S., Tango C.N., Park Y.S., Oh D.H. (2016): Prevalence and control of Listeria monocytogenes in the food industry – a review. Czech J. Food Sci., 34: 469–487. Listeria monocytogenes is a Gram-positive facultative intracellular organism and causative agent of the severe foodborne infection listeriosis. L. monocytogenes is more likely to cause death rather than other path...

Assume that the reproduction rate ratio zeta of the predator over the prey is sufficiently small in a basic tri-trophic food chain model. This assumption translates the model into a singularly perturbed system of two time scales. It is demonstrated, as a sequel to the earlier paper of Deng [Chaos 11, 514-525 (2001)], that at the singular limit zeta=0, a singular Shilnikov's saddle-focus homocli...

Chaotic dynamics of a classical prey-predator-superpredator ecological model are considered. Although much is known about the behavior of the model numerically, very few results have been proven analytically. A new analytical result is obtained. It is demonstrated that there exists a subset on which a singular Poincare map generated by the model is conjugate to the shift map on two symbols. The...

The main modes of behavior of a food chain model, composed of logistic prey and Holling type II predator and superpredator, are discussed in this paper. The study is carried out through bifurcation analysis, alternating between a normal form approach and numerical continuation. The two-parameter bifurcation diagram of the model contains Hopf, fold and transcritical bifurcation curves of equilib...

When it comes to pesticides’ effects on frogs, sublethal concentrations do not preclude lethality. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the October issue of the journal Ecological Applications. After dosing wood frogs and leopard frogs with very small concentrations of the popular pesticide malathion, the researchers discovered that the chemical did not kill the frogs directly—inst...