Department of Ecology, Theoretical Ecology, Ecology Building, Lund University, S-223 62 Lund, Sweden.
Trends Ecol Evol. 1988 Nov;3(11):303-6. doi: 10.1016/0169-5347(88)90106-1.
Traditional niche theory has its formal roots in the equilibrium solutions to Lotka-Volterra type equations. In recent years, this theory has lost much of its former pre-eminence for those interested in communities of sessile organisms, as witnessed by two recent reviews in TREE. Of the alternative theories that are now emerging, the so-called lottery theories have in common the assumption that the population dynamics of species are partly governed by random factors that are intrinsic to the system. They are thus genuinely stochastic community theories, in that randomness is taken as a system's property rather than as a 'disturbance' that is imposed from the outside. Analyses of these theories suggest, contrary to classical results, that coexistence of very similar species is possible, that environmental variability generally enhances such coexistence and that convergent, rather than divergent, evolution may be a result of interspecific competitive interactions.
传统生态位理论在形式上源于洛特卡-沃尔泰拉（Lotka-Volterra）类型方程的平衡解。近年来，对于那些关注固着生物群落的人来说，该理论已经失去了其昔日的大部分优势，这一点在最近的两篇 TREE 综述中得到了证实。在目前涌现的替代理论中，所谓的“彩票理论”有一个共同点，即物种的种群动态部分受系统固有随机因素的控制。因此，它们是真正的随机群落理论，因为随机性被视为系统的属性，而不是来自外部的“干扰”。这些理论的分析表明，与经典结果相反，非常相似的物种可以共存，环境变异性通常会增强这种共存，而且种间竞争相互作用的结果可能是趋同进化，而不是趋异进化。
