Threshold-Driven Range Dynamics: The Impact of Metabolic Costs and Landscape Fragmentation on Ecological Colonization

This record contains a complete scholarly manuscript investigating the spatial dynamics of ecological colonization using a reaction–diffusion framework. The study incorporates a bistable Allee effect, explicit metabolic maintenance costs, environmental stochasticity, and landscape fragmentation to examine how populations expand, stall, retreat, or go extinct across heterogeneous environments. By mapping outcomes across growth efficiency and maintenance cost, the work identifies four distinct ecological regimes and demonstrates that front velocity, rather than local biomass density, is the primary metric of colonization fitness. Competitive simulations further explore specialist–generalist trade-offs under high-resource conditions. The manuscript is intended as a theoretical and computational contribution to spatial ecology and applied mathematical biology.