Related papers: Towards a heuristic understanding of the storage e…
The storage effect is a well-known explanation for coexistence in temporally varying environments. Like many complex ecological theories, the storage effect is often used as an explanation for observed coexistence on the basis of heuristic…
The storage effect is a general explanation for ecological coexistence, wherein different species specialize on different states of a fluctuating environment, e.g., hot vs. cold years. Despite the storage effect's prominence in theoretical…
Explaining coexistence in species-rich communities of primary producers remains a challenge for ecologists because of their likely competition for shared resources. Following Hutchinson's seminal suggestion, many theoreticians have tried to…
Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…
Microbial populations generally evolve in volatile environments, under conditions fluctuating between harsh and mild, e.g. as the result of sudden changes in toxin concentration or nutrient abundance. Environmental variability thus shapes…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
Individuals within any species exhibit differences in size, developmental state, or spatial location. These differences coupled with environmental fluctuations in demographic rates can have subtle effects on population persistence and…
Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
Ecological trade-offs between species are often invoked to explain species coexistence in ecological communities. However, few mathematical models have been proposed for which coexistence conditions can be characterized explicitly in terms…
How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…
Ecologists have put forward many explanations for coexistence, but these are only partial explanations; nature is complex, so it is reasonable to assume that in any given ecological community, multiple mechanisms of coexistence are…
Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we…
Natural ecosystems, in particular on the microbial scale, are inhabited by a large number of species. The population size of each species is affected by interactions of individuals with each other and by spatial and temporal changes in…
In its simplest form, the competitive exclusion principle states that a number of species competing for a smaller number of resources cannot coexist. However, it has been observed empirically that in some settings it is possible to have…
The paper explores the influence of harvesting (or culling) on the outcome of the competition of two species in a spatially heterogeneous environment. The harvesting effort is assumed to be proportional to the space-dependent intrinsic…
This paper investigates the competition of two species in a heterogeneous environment subject to the effect of harvesting. The most realistic harvesting case is connected with the intrinsic growth rate, and the harvesting functions are…
If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as…
The properties of competition models where all individuals are identical are relatively well-understood; however, juveniles and adults can experience or generate competition differently. We study here less well-known structured competition…