ABSTRACT
Deforestation of a forest habitat caused by industrialization, pollution, and increasing population, is of great concern to all humankind. A typical example in this regard is the depletion of the forest resources in the Doon Valley located in the foothills of Himalayas, Uttarakhand, India. Here the depletion of the forest has been caused mainly by limestone quarrying, paper, and other wood-based industries and associated population migration [169]. Shukla et al. [164] have proposed a mathematical model for forest depletion caused by resource independent industrialization (population) by considering the spatial distribution of both the forest biomass as well as the density of industrialization. By studying the behavior of uniform steady state solution, they have shown that if industrialization increases without control, the forest biomass may not last long. Freedman and Shukla [41] have proposed and analyzed the effect of diffusion and an alternative resource of predator population on predator-prey systems. They, however, did not consider the effect of patchiness in the habitat.
