TY - JOUR
T1 - Individualism in plant populations
T2 - Using stochastic differential equations to model individual neighbourhood-dependent plant growth
AU - Lv, Qiming
AU - Schneider, Manuel K.
AU - Pitchford, Jonathan W.
PY - 2008/8
Y1 - 2008/8
N2 - We study individual plant growth and size hierarchy formation in an experimental population of Arabidopsis thaliana, within an integrated analysis that explicitly accounts for size-dependent growth, size- and space-dependent competition, and environmental stochasticity. It is shown that a Gompertz-type stochastic differential equation (SDE) model, involving asymmetric competition kernels and a stochastic term which decreases with the logarithm of plant weight, efficiently describes individual plant growth, competition, and variability in the studied population. The model is evaluated within a Bayesian framework and compared to its deterministic counterpart, and to several simplified stochastic models, using distributional validation. We show that stochasticity is an important determinant of size hierarchy and that SDE models outperform the deterministic model if and only if structural components of competition (asymmetry; size- and space-dependence) are accounted for. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of plant ecology and in more general modelling situations. Crown Copyright (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
AB - We study individual plant growth and size hierarchy formation in an experimental population of Arabidopsis thaliana, within an integrated analysis that explicitly accounts for size-dependent growth, size- and space-dependent competition, and environmental stochasticity. It is shown that a Gompertz-type stochastic differential equation (SDE) model, involving asymmetric competition kernels and a stochastic term which decreases with the logarithm of plant weight, efficiently describes individual plant growth, competition, and variability in the studied population. The model is evaluated within a Bayesian framework and compared to its deterministic counterpart, and to several simplified stochastic models, using distributional validation. We show that stochasticity is an important determinant of size hierarchy and that SDE models outperform the deterministic model if and only if structural components of competition (asymmetry; size- and space-dependence) are accounted for. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of plant ecology and in more general modelling situations. Crown Copyright (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
KW - neighbourhood competition
KW - size hierarchies
KW - stochasticity
KW - Bayesian statistics
KW - Gompertz growth
KW - von Bertalanffy growth
KW - zones of influence
KW - COMPETITIVE SYMMETRY
KW - SIZE
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=46449083184&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.tpb.2008.05.003
DO - 10.1016/j.tpb.2008.05.003
M3 - Article
SN - 0040-5809
VL - 74
SP - 74
EP - 83
JO - Theoretical Population Biology
JF - Theoretical Population Biology
IS - 1
ER -