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 within the same species, a multitude of consumer species can self-organize to coexist in a well-mixed system with one or a few biotic resource species. The coexistence modes can manifest as either stable steady states or self-organized oscillations. Importantly, all coexistence states are robust to stochasticity, whether employing the stochastic simulation algorithm or individual-based modeling. Our model quantitatively illustrates species distribution patterns across a wide range of ecological communities and can be broadly used to explain biodiversity in many biotic resource systems.
@article{arxiv.2311.13830,
title = {Self-organized biodiversity in biotic resource systems},
author = {Ju Kang and Shijie Zhang and Yiyuan Niu and Xin Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.13830},
year = {2025}
}