Am Nat. 2022 Oct;200(4):E160-E173. doi: 10.1086/720665. Epub 2022 Aug 18.
AbstractAn understanding of the mechanisms that facilitate coexistence in ecological communities poses a major challenge to theoretical ecology. A popular paradigmatic scheme distinguishes between two qualitatively different processes that help species to coexist: stabilizing mechanisms increase niche differentiation, making the intraspecific competition stronger than the interspecific one, while equalizing mechanisms diminish fitness differences, making the competition less decisive. Here, we provide an analytic and numeric examination of the quantitative features associated with this scheme for a simple, two-species competition model. We show that the main metrics of persistence change only slightly along the stabilizing-equalizing continuum, where niche overlap increases while fitness differences decreases. Therefore, persistence properties cannot indicate the dominant mechanism that promotes coexistence and vice versa. Cross correlations between abundance time series are shown to provide a decent characterization of the mechanisms that promote coexistence. The relevance of these insights to the analysis of diverse assemblages is discussed.
摘要
理解促进生态群落共存的机制对理论生态学提出了重大挑战。一个流行的范例方案区分了有助于物种共存的两种定性不同的过程：稳定机制增加了生态位分化，使种内竞争比种间竞争更强，而均衡机制则减少了适应度差异，使竞争不那么决定性。在这里，我们对一个简单的两种物种竞争模型的这个方案相关的定量特征进行了分析和数值检验。我们表明，主要的持久性度量仅沿着稳定-均衡连续体略有变化，其中生态位重叠增加，而适应度差异减小。因此，持久性特征不能表明促进共存的主要机制，反之亦然。丰度时间序列之间的交叉相关被证明可以很好地描述促进共存的机制。讨论了这些见解对分析各种组合的相关性。
