How similar can co-occurring species be in the presence of competition and ecological drift?

ABSTRACT: If two species live on a single resource, the one with a slight advantage will out-compete the other: complete competitors cannot coexist. This is known as the competitive exclusion principle. If no extinction occurs, it is because evolutionary adaptation to slightly different niches takes place. Therefore, it is widely accepted that ecological communities are assembled by evolutionary differentiation and progressive adaptation of species to different niches. However, some ecologists have recently challenged this classic paradigm highlighting the importance of chance and stochasticity. Using a synthetic framework for community dynamics, here we show that, while deterministic descriptors predict coexistence, species similarity is limited in a more restrictive way in the presence of stochast

SUBMITTER: Capitan JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4614473 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature