We study frequency-dependent seed predation (FDP) in a model of competing annual plant species in a variable environment. The combination of a variable environment and competition leads to the storage-effect coexistence mechanism (SE), which is a leading hypothesis for coexistence of desert annual plants. However, seed predation in such systems demands attention to coexistence mechanisms associ...

Using fundamental measure density functional theory we investigate paranematic-nematic and nematic-nematic phase coexistence in binary mixtures of circular platelets with vanishing thicknesses. An external magnetic field induces uniaxial alignment and acts on the platelets with a strength that is taken to scale with the platelet area. At particle diameter ratio λ = 1.5 the system displays paran...

■ Abstract The focus of most ideas on diversity maintenance is species coexistence, which may be stable or unstable. Stable coexistence can be quantified by the long-term rates at which community members recover from low density. Quantification shows that coexistence mechanisms function in two major ways: They may be (a) equalizing because they tend to minimize average fitness differences betwe...

The contribution of deterministic and stochastic processes to species coexistence is widely debated. With the introduction of powerful statistical techniques, we can now better characterise different sources of uncertainty when quantifying niche differentiation. The theoretical literature on the effect of stochasticity on coexistence, however, is often ignored by field ecologists because of its...

The association between species richness and ecosystem energy availability is one of the major geographic trends in biodiversity. It is often explained in terms of energetic constraints, such that coexistence among competing species is limited in low productivity environments. However, it has proven challenging to reject alternative views, including the null hypothesis that species richness has...

I investigated mechanisms of parasitoid coexistence in a spatially structured host–multiparasitoid community (harlequin bugs [Murgantia histrionica] and two specialist parasitoids [Trissolcus murgantiae and Ooencyrtus johnsonii ]). I tested both local and metapopulation hypotheses. The local hypothesis, intraguild predation, predicts coexistence if the inferior larval competitor is superior at ...

The 2.4 GHz ISM band provides an attractive medium for developing tethered free applications based on current and proposed wireless standards. Since the ISM band is a shared spectrum allowing unlicensed operation of wireless services, coexistence between the wireless services needs to be considered to ensure performance requirements are maintained. A general method for evaluating coexistence is...

How biological diversity is generated and maintained is a fundamental question in ecology. Ecologists have delineated many mechanisms that can, in principle, favor species coexistence and hence maintain biodiversity. Most such coexistence mechanisms require or imply tradeoffs between different aspects of species performance. However, it remains unknown whether simple functional tradeoffs underl...

Models of competitive template replication, although basic for replicator dynamics and primordial evolution, have not yet taken different sequences explicitly into account, neither have they analyzed the effect of resource partitioning (feeding on different resources) on coexistence. Here we show by analytical and numerical calculations that Gause's principle of competitive exclusion holds for ...

Most terrestrial plant communities exhibit relatively high species diversity and many competitive species are ubiquitous. Many theoretical studies have been carried out to investigate the coexistence of a few competitive species and in most cases they suggest competitive exclusion. Theoretical studies have revealed that coexistence of even three or four species can be extremely difficult. It ha...