Rigorous Analysis of a Nonlocal Transport--Renewal System for Physiologically Structured Populations

Abstract

We develop a rigorous analytical framework for a class of physiologically structured population models with two internal state variables, nonlocal ecological feedbacks, dynamic resources, inter-zone transfer, and selective harvesting. The full model is a coupled nonlinear PDE--ODE transport--renewal system with endogenous inflow at the recruitment boundary, a setting in which transport, nonlocal dependence, and boundary renewal interact at the same level. For this full nonautonomous multi-zone system, we prove finite-horizon well-posedness in a positive $L^{1}$-based state space, including global existence on arbitrary bounded time intervals, uniqueness, nonnegativity, and continuous dependence on initial data, environmental forcing, and harvesting effort. We then isolate an autonomous single-zone reduction at extinction and construct a positive compact next-generation operator on the recruit space. In a further nonlinear stationary reduction, we prove that supercriticality of the basic reproduction number $\mathcal R_{0}>1$ yields existence of a nontrivial stationary state under a parametrized compact-operator hypothesis encoding density-dependent renewal feedback. Finally, for a finite-horizon harvest objective over a compact Lipschitz-regular admissible class, we establish existence of an optimal control. The results separate what can be proved for the full climate-explicit system from what can be justified only after autonomous reduction, thereby clarifying the mathematical scope of threshold and control theory for structured populations.