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The review and systematization of current papers on the mathematical modeling of population dynamics allow us to conclude the key interests of authors are two or three main research lines related to the description and analysis of the dynamics of both local structured populations and systems of interacting homogeneous populations as ecological community in physical space. The paper reviews and systematizes scientific studies and results obtained within the framework of dynamics of structured and interacting populations to date. The paper describes the scientific idea progress in the direction of complicating models from the classical Malthus model to the modern models with various factors affecting population dynamics in the issues dealing with modeling the local population size dynamics. In particular, they consider the dynamic effects that arise as a result of taking into account the environmental capacity, density-dependent regulation, the Allee effect, complexity of an age and a stage structures. Particular attention is paid to the multistability of population dynamics. In addition, studies analyzing harvest effect on structured population dynamics and an appearance of the hydra effect are presented. The studies dealing with an appearance and development of spatial dissipative structures in both spatially separated populations and communities with migrations are discussed. Here, special attention is also paid to the frequency and phase multistability of population dynamics, as well as to an appearance of spatial clusters. During the systematization and review of articles on modeling the interacting population dynamics, the focus is on the “prey–predator” community. The key idea and approaches used in current mathematical biology to model a “prey–predator” system with community structure and harvesting are presented. The problems of an appearance and stability of the mosaic structure in communities distributed spatially and coupled by migration are also briefly discussed.

Based on the time-discrete model, we study the effect of selective proportional harvesting on the population dynamics with age and sex structure. When constructing the model, we assume that the population birth rate depends on the ratio of the sexes and the number of formed pairs. The regulation of population growth is carried out by limiting the juvenile’s survival when the survival of immature individuals decreases with an increase in the numbers of sex and age classes. We consider cases where the harvest is carried out only from a younger age class or from a group of mature females or males. We find that the harvesting of males or females at the optimal level is responsible for changing the ratio of females to males (taking into account the average size of the harem). We show that the maximum number of harvested males is achieved either at such a harvest rate when their excess number is withdrawn and the balance of sexes is established or at such an optimal catch quota at which the sex ratio is shifted towards breeding females. Optimal female harvesting, in which the highest number of them are taken, either maintains a preexisting shortage of adult males or leads to an excess of males or the fixing of a sex balance. We find that, depending on the population parameters for all considered harvesting strategies, the hydra effect can observe, i. e., the equilibrium size of the exploited sex and age-specific group (after reproduction) can increase with the growth of harvesting intensity. The selective harvesting, due to which the hydra effect occurs, simultaneously leads to an increase remaining population size and the number of harvested individuals. At the same time, the size of the exploited group after reproduction can become even more than without exploitation. Equilibrium harvesting with the optimal harvest rate that maximizes yield leads to a population size decrease. The effect of hydra is at lower values of the catch quota than the optimal harvest rate. At the same time, the consequence of the hydra effect may be a higher abundance of the age-sex group under optimal exploitation compared to the level observed in the absence of harvesting.