Rejuvenating functional responses with renewal theory.

ABSTRACT: Functional responses are widely used to describe interactions and resource exchange between individuals in ecology. The form given to functional responses dramatically affects the dynamics and stability of populations and communities. Despite their importance, functional responses are generally considered with a phenomenological approach, without clear mechanistic justifications from individual traits and behaviours. Here, we develop a bottom-up stochastic framework grounded in renewal theory that shows how functional responses emerge from the level of the individuals through the decomposition of interactions into different activities. Our framework has many applications for conceptual, theoretical and empirical purposes. First, we show how the mean and variance of classical functional res

SUBMITTER: Billiard S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6170772 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature