2019/11/30 by Wenping Cui, Robert Marsland, Robert Marsland III +1 · 68 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies #Biology #Chemical physics #Computer science #Dynamics (music) #Ecology #Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies #Ecosystem #Environmental science #Physics #Plant and animal studies #Resource (disambiguation) #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.048101
published in Physical Review Letters 125(4), 048101 (American Physical Society) · 17 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2020/07/21 · openalex publication_date 2020/07/21 · arxiv updated 2020/07/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The competitive exclusion principle asserts that coexisting species must occupy distinct ecological niches (i.e., the number of surviving species cannot exceed the number of resources). An open question is to understand if and how different resource dynamics affect this bound. Here, we analyze a generalized consumer resource model with externally supplied resources and show that-in contrast to self-renewing resources-species can occupy only half of all available environmental niches. This motivates us to construct a new schema for classifying ecosystems based on species packing properties.