Species coexistence as an emergent effect of interacting mechanisms

Thomas Seidelmann and Sanaz Mostaghim

Theoretical Population Biology, 2025, vol. 162, issue C, 13-21

Abstract: Although extensively studied, the maintenance of biodiversity remains a highly debated and investigated topic of contemporary research in ecology. Several studies have quantified the contributions of various coexistence mechanisms to biodiversity. However, often stochastic individual-level interactions are abstracted away, or mechanisms are studied in isolation. The intertwined nature and reciprocal influences between mechanisms, as they arise from individual-level interactions, are therefore rarely considered. We propose a novel mechanistic simulation model grounded in neutral theory to capture and quantify emergent effects arising from such mechanism interactions. Three coexistence mechanisms are supported: storage effect, intransitivity, and resource partitioning. We show that basic neutral dynamics and related models of isolated mechanisms can be replicated. Beyond that, we observe difficult to predict, yet significant emergent effects for mechanism combinations. In some cases, coexistence times could be extended more than tenfold compared to the individual mechanisms’ performances. Our findings suggest that studies of individual coexistence mechanisms might be insufficient and indeed misleading for quantifying their overall impact on biodiversity. The particular combination of mechanisms and their interactions appear to be of vital importance.

Keywords: Species coexistence; Individual-based model; Neutral theory; Storage effect; Intransitivity; Resource partitioning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580924001084
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:162:y:2025:i:c:p:13-21

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2024.12.005

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve

More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().