Treffer: Strategic synergies: Dispersal and resource allocation in mitigating tipping cascades.

While ecosystems may experience sudden transitions to a degraded state under intensified exploitation, the impact of additional food provision in exploited patchy environments remains largely unexplored. This study investigates the trade-off between connectivity and resource allocation in mitigating tipping points that could lead to metacommunity-level population collapse. We first explore predator-prey dynamics within an isolated patch, investigating the effects of predator harvesting and additional food provision on population persistence. Our results reveal that, while additional food can rescue predators in scarcity, excessive provisioning may disrupt the trophic balance. Strategic harvesting helps mitigate this risk, but multistability across harvesting intensities complicates ecological management. Extending our analysis to a two-patch system with diffusive coupling, we find that a carefully calibrated food share ratio between patches is essential for long-term steady-state coexistence, with the required ratio modulated by coupling strength. However, beyond a critical dispersal threshold, stability can be maintained without strict adherence to a specific supply ratio. While dispersal aids in local predator rescue, higher flow can trigger a tipping point, resulting in catastrophic predator collapses across the metacommunity. Our findings reveal a potential rescue mechanism in which maintaining adequate food quality - ensuring uniformity across patches - is crucial to preventing abrupt population extinction, especially under strong connectivity. Overall, our study underscores the importance of integrating dispersal dynamics and the resource allocation mechanism in shaping ecosystem resilience, providing insight into strategies to mitigate population collapses in fragmented habitats.
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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests. Sudeshna Sinha reports financial support was provided by Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali. Saswati Biswas reports financial support was provided by Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali. Sudeshna Sinha reports financial support was provided by Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF). If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.