Chaotic behaviour of population dynamic systems in ecology

In recent years, considerable progress has been made in analysing complexities in the chaotic (or dynamical) behaviour of ecosystems. In this paper, analytical and numerical studies of three-species food chain models are carried out. A technique has been developed to study the chaotic behaviour of ecological models, which helps in obtaining the realistic parametric values for the study of system's dynamics. Varying one of the critical parameters in its range while keeping all the others constant, one can monitor the changes in the dynamical behaviour of the system, thereby, fixing the regimes in which the system exhibits chaotic dynamics. Detailed dynamical studies of model systems are carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the method presented. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.