2022/05/02 by Robert West, Nadav M. Shnerb · 12 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Social Sciences · #Biology #Coexistence theory #Competition (biology) #Ecology #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Evolutionary biology #Interspecific competition #Intraspecific competition #Mechanism (biology) #Niche #Niche differentiation #Persistence (discontinuity) #Physics #Plant and animal studies
paper · doi:10.1086/720665
published in The American Naturalist 200(4), E160-E173 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 2022/05/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
AbstractAn understanding of the mechanisms that facilitate coexistence in ecological communities poses a major challenge to theoretical ecology. A popular paradigmatic scheme distinguishes between two qualitatively different processes that help species to coexist: stabilizing mechanisms increase niche differentiation, making the intraspecific competition stronger than the interspecific one, while equalizing mechanisms diminish fitness differences, making the competition less decisive. Here, we provide an analytic and numeric examination of the quantitative features associated with this scheme for a simple, two-species competition model. We show that the main metrics of persistence change only slightly along the stabilizing-equalizing continuum, where niche overlap increases while fitness differences decreases. Therefore, persistence properties cannot indicate the dominant mechanism that promotes coexistence and vice versa. Cross correlations between abundance time series are shown to provide a decent characterization of the mechanisms that promote coexistence. The relevance of these insights to the analysis of diverse assemblages is discussed.