Related papers: Geometry of ecological coexistence and niche diffe…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
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…
Explaining biodiversity in nature is a fundamental problem in ecology. An outstanding challenge is embodied in the so-called Competitive Exclusion Principle: two species competing for one limiting resource cannot coexist at constant…
How ecosystems respond to environmental perturbations is a fundamental question in ecology, made especially challenging due to the strong coupling between species and their environment. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework for…
A novel mathematical framework is proposed to describe the ecological and evolutionary consequences of consumer--resource interactions. Both the consumer and resource are assumed to consist of several (sub)species, which interact between…
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…
This is the first of two papers where we discuss the limits imposed by competition to the biodiversity of species communities. In this first paper we study the coexistence of competing species at the fixed point of population dynamic…
Understanding the mechanisms of species coexistence has always been a fundamental topic in ecology. Classical theory predicts that interspecific competition may select for traits that stabilize niche differences, although recent work shows…
Contemporary Niche Theory is a useful framework for understanding how organisms interact with each other and with their shared environment. Its graphical representation, popularized by Tilman's Resource Ratio Hypothesis, facilitates the…
Species sharing a habitat will co-evolve to make use of the available resources, as consumption is modulated by competition and negative feedback loops between consumers and resources. The dietary range of a given species determines the…
Explaining biodiversity is a fundamental issue in ecology. A long-standing puzzle lies in the paradox of the plankton: many species of plankton feeding on a limited variety of resources coexist, apparently flouting the competitive exclusion…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…
This paper investigates the coexistence of two competing species on random geometric graphs (RGGs) in continuous time. The species grow by occupying vacant sites according to Richardson's model, while simultaneously competing for occupied…
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…
A fundamental problem in evolutionary ecology research is to explain how different species coexist in natural ecosystems. This question is directly related with species trophic competition. However, competition theory, based on the…
The competitive exclusion principle asserts that coexisting species must occupy distinct ecological niches (i.e. the number of surviving species can not exceed the number of resources). An open question is to understand if and how different…
We present properties of Lotka-Volterra equations describing ecological competition among a large number of competing species. First we extend to the case of a non-homogeneous niche space stability conditions for solutions representing…
Consumer foraging behaviors are dynamic, changing in response to prey availability, seasonality, competition, and even the consumer's physiological state. The isotopic composition of a consumer is a product of these factors as well as the…
Explaining how competing species coexist remains a central question in ecology. The well-known competitive exclusion principle (CEP) states that two species competing for the same resource cannot stably coexist, and more generally, that the…