The Effects of Competitive Asymmetry on the Rate of Competitive Displacement: How Robust is Hubbell's Community Drift Model?
✍ Scribed by Da-Yong Zhang; Kui Lin
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 217 KB
- Volume
- 188
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5193
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
It is intuitively clear that the average time required for competitive exclusion increases as the competitive abilities of species become closer to equal. To emphasize the importance of this point for understanding diversity patterns, Hubbell and his colleagues modeled tropical rainforest dynamics under the extreme assumption of competitive equivalency. In this study, we aim to extend Hubbell's community drift model to the cases of unequal competitive abilities. We find that a slight variation upon the assumption of equality of species could cause a considerable decline in the persistence time of species. Since species cannot be ecologically identical in any real ecosystems, we conclude that the community drift hypothesis is, at best, rather restricted in the domain of applicability.