Intraguild Predation in Periodic Habitats

Fragmentation of natural landscapes is an ongoing process, mainly led by human activities, such as urban growth, roadway construction and farming. This phenomena may lead to many changes in the dynamics of populations that live in such landscapes, posing new challenges to our understanding of population persistence and diversity therein. In this work we consider an Intraguild Predation (IGP) model, a community module composed of two consumers of a shared resource, with a predation relation between such consumers, usually referred as IG-Prey and IG-Predator. Using Cobbold and Yurk's homogenization technique, we formulate and investigate the problem in a periodic habitat, composed of two types of patches where IGP relations are present, but allowed to have different parameters, such as less resource consumption, enhanced mortality or reduced resource productivity in one of the patches. Our results show that coexistence between IG-Prey and IG-Predator in heterogeneous landscapes is facilitated or hardened depending on the resource's habitat preference, allowing for coexistence in parameter regions which, in homogeneous landscapes, would be impossible, for example.