Building clone-consistent ecosystem models.

ABSTRACT: Many ecological studies employ general models that can feature an arbitrary number of populations. A critical requirement imposed on such models is clone consistency: If the individuals from two populations are indistinguishable, joining these populations into one shall not affect the outcome of the model. Otherwise a model produces different outcomes for the same scenario. Using functional analysis, we comprehensively characterize all clone-consistent models: We prove that they are necessarily composed from basic building blocks, namely linear combinations of parameters and abundances. These strong constraints enable a straightforward validation of model consistency. Although clone consistency can always be achieved with sufficient assumptions, we argue that it is important to explicitly

SUBMITTER: Ansmann G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7895417 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature