Stabilizing Role of Harvesting on a Chaotic Intraguild Predation Model

We consider a three-species Lotka-Volterra intraguild predation (IGP) model where the basal resource is harvested due to its economic value. First, we study the effects of the harvesting rate on the existence and local stability of all equilibrium solutions of the model. In particular, the analysis for the positive equilibrium provides conditions for coexistence of all species, while the analyses for the boundary and trivial equilibria provide conditions for extinction of one or more species. We then show the stabilizing role of harvesting on a chaotic IGP model. Specifically, we show that there is a window of values of the harvesting rate where chaotic dynamics stabilizes to the positive equilibrium. Numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate all results.