We analyze the optimal harvesting problem for an ecosystem of species that experience environmental stochasticity. Our work generalizes the current literature significantly by taking into account non-linear interactions between species, state-dependent prices, and species injections. The key generalization is making it possible to not only harvest, but also 'seed' individuals into the ecosystem. This is motivated by how fisheries and certain endangered species are controlled. The harvesting problem becomes finding the optimal harvesting-seeding strategy that maximizes the expected total income from the harvest minus the lost income from the species injections. Our analysis shows that new phenomena emerge due to the possibility of species injections.It is well-known that multidimensional harvesting problems are very hard to tackle. We are able to make progress, by characterizing the value function as a viscosity solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations. Moreover, we provide a verification theorem, which tells us that if a function has certain properties, then it will be the value function. This allows us to show heuristically, as was shown in Lungu and Øksendal (Bernoulli '01), that it is almost surely never optimal to harvest or seed from more than one population at a time.It is usually impossible to find closed-form solutions for the optimal harvesting-seeding strategy. In order to by-pass this obstacle we approximate the continuous-time systems by Markov chains. We show that the optimal harvesting-seeding strategies of the Markov chain approximations converge to the correct optimal harvesting strategy. This is used to provide numerical approximations to the optimal harvesting-seeding strategies and is a first step towards a full understanding of the intricacies of how one should harvest and seed interacting species. In particular, we look at three examples: one species modeled by a Verhulst-Pearl diffusion, two competing species and a two-species predator-prey system.

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This paper is concerned with the qualitative properties of viscocity solutions to a class of Hamilton-Jacobi equations (HJEs) in Banach spaces. Specifically, based on the concept of β-derivative [13] we establish the existence, uniqueness and stability of β-viscosity solutions for a class of HJEs in the form u + H(x, u, Du) = 0. The obtained results in this paper extend ealier works in the literature, for example, [8], [9] and [13].

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