Section for Soil Ecology, Dept of Ecology and Environmental Research, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7072, S-750 07 Uppsala, Sweden.
Trends Ecol Evol. 1994 Jul;9(7):246-50. doi: 10.1016/0169-5347(94)90289-5.
Few ecologists today doubt that competition is an important structuring factor in plant communities, but researchers disagree on the circumstances where it is most intense, and on which traits can be considered to contribute to competitive ability in different species. The distinction between a species' effect on resources and its response to reduced resource levels might help to solve these questions. Whereas classical competition theory predicts competitive exclusion of species with similar requirements, recent ideas stress that species diversity may be explained by a multitude of processes acting at different scales, and that similarities in competitive abilities often may facilitate coexistence.
如今，很少有生态学家怀疑竞争是植物群落的一个重要结构因素，但研究人员对于竞争最激烈的情况以及哪些特征可以被认为有助于不同物种的竞争能力存在分歧。区分物种对资源的影响及其对资源水平降低的反应可能有助于解决这些问题。虽然经典的竞争理论预测具有相似需求的物种会相互排斥，但最近的观点强调，物种多样性可以通过在不同尺度上起作用的多种过程来解释，而且竞争能力的相似性往往可以促进共存。
