 Community recomposition caused by species extinction in the colonization-competition trade-off model for vegetationDorian Nothaaß and Andreas Huth Ecological Modelling, 2025, vol. 499, issue C Abstract: Species extinction and the resulting impact on the community composition is a pervasive threat to vegetation ecosystems today. Understanding how the extinction of one or more species affects and threatens biodiversity is challenging. Here, we study the scenario of a sudden species extinction in the colonization-competition trade-off model by assuming that a disturbance eliminates a species on a fleeting time scale. The system then returns to equilibrium, but the equilibrial abundances have changed for all inferior competitors. We use numerical and analytical calculations to show that the sudden extinction of one species results in a large increase in abundance of the next inferior competitor and subsequent additional extinction of the next-but-one inferior species. We present the changes in community composition and diversity using rank abundance distributions and the Shannon index, respectively. In addition to theoretical parameterizations, we use data for grasslands, which are exponentially distributed, where additional species extinctions occur. Keywords: Metapopulation theory; Theoretical ecology; Biodiversity; Rank-abundance curves; Coexitence (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:499:y:2025:i:c:s0304380024002941 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110906 Access Statistics for this article Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier |
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