Landscape and environmental heterogeneity support coexistence in competitive metacommunities.

ABSTRACT: Metapopulation models have been instrumental in quantifying the ecological impact of landscape structure on the survival of a focal species. However, extensions to multiple species with arbitrary dispersal networks often rely on phenomenological assumptions that inevitably limit their scope. Here, we propose a multilayer network model of competitive dispersing metacommunities to investigate how spatially structured environments impact species coexistence and ecosystem stability. We introduce the concept of landscape-mediated fitness, quantifying how fit a species is in a given environment in terms of colonization and extinction. We show that, when all environments are equivalent, one species excludes all the others-except the marginal case where species fitnesses are in exact trade-off. Ho

SUBMITTER: Padmanabha P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11536131 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature