Abstract
How should plant ecologists scale up from the fine-scale events affecting individual plants in small neighborhoods to the coarse-scale dynamics of plant communities? We give here a dynamical system, derived from an individual-based model, that captures the main effects of spatial structure. The individual-based model describes a multispecies plant community, living in a spatial domain, containing plants that (1) reproduce and die with rates that depend on other individuals in a specified neighborhood, and (2) move through seed dispersal and clonal growth. Over the course Of time, substantial spatial structure can build up in such a community due to local interactions and dispersal. The dynamical system describes how the structure of local neighborhoods changes over time, using the first and second spatial moments of the individual-based model. We show, by means of an example of two competing species, that the dynamical system gives a close approximation to the behavior of the underlying individual-based model and that the changes in local spatial structure as time progresses have fundamental effects on the dynamics.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2137-2148 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Ecology |
| Volume | 81 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2000 |
Keywords
- community dynamics
- competition
- competitive exclusion
- dispersal
- dynamical systems
- individual-based models
- moment dynamics
- plant's-eye view
- reproduction
- seed dispersal
- spatial ecology
- stochastic processes
- TRIFOLIUM-REPENS
- COMPETITION
- MODELS
- PATTERN
- GROWTH
- BIODIVERSITY
- ECOSYSTEMS
- ANNUALS
- PASTURE