Stochastic competitive exclusion leads to a cascade of species extinctions

DOI10.1016/J.JTBI.2017.02.007zbMATH Open1370.92129arXiv1608.03594OpenAlexW2962988716WikidataQ46419073 ScholiaQ46419073MaRDI QIDQ2402302FDOQ2402302

Authors: José A. Capitán, Sara Cuenda, David Alonso 

Publication date: 7 September 2017

Published in: Journal of Theoretical Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Community ecology has traditionally relied on the competitive exclusion principle, a piece of common wisdom in conceptual frameworks developed to describe species assemblages. Key concepts in community ecology, such as limiting similarity and niche partitioning, are based on competitive exclusion. However, this classical paradigm in ecology relies on implications derived from simple, deterministic models. Here we show how the predictions of a symmetric, deterministic model about the way extinctions proceed can be utterly different from the results derived from the same model when ecological drift (demographic stochasticity) is explicitly considered. Using analytical approximations to the steady-state conditional probabilities for assemblages with two and three species, we demonstrate that stochastic competitive exclusion leads to a cascade of extinctions, whereas the symmetric, deterministic model predicts a multiple collapse of species. To test the robustness of our results, we have studied the effect of environmental stochasticity and relaxed the species symmetry assumption. Our conclusions highlight the crucial role of stochasticity when deriving reliable theoretical predictions for species community assembly.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03594

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zbMATH Keywords

competitive exclusioncontinuous-time Markov processesecological drift

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of continuous-time Markov processes on discrete state spaces (60J28) Problems related to evolution (92D15) Population dynamics (general) (92D25)

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Cited In (13)

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• A stochastic dispersal-limited trait-based model of community dynamics
• Integrability of stochastic birth-death processes via differential Galois theory
• Impacts of phylogenetic dilution and concentration effects on species diversity and distribution patterns
• The impact of initial evenness on biodiversity maintenance for a four-species \textit{in silico} bacterial community
• Emergence of structured communities through evolutionary dynamics
• Predicting stochastic community dynamics in grasslands under the assumption of competitive symmetry
• Collapse and recovery times in non-linear harvesting with demographic stochasticity
• Neutral community theory: How stochasticity and dispersal-limitation can explain species coexistence
• Competitive dominance in plant communities: modeling approaches and theoretical predictions
• Ecological and genetic effects of introduced species on their native competitors
• Processes governing species richness in communities exposed to temporal environmental stochasticity: a review and synthesis of modelling approaches
• Limiting similarity, species packing, and the shape of competition kernels

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