Few ecologists today doubt that competition is an important structuring factor in plant communities, but researchers disagree on the circumstances where it is most intense, and on which traits can be considered to contribute to competitive ability in different species. The distinction between a species' effect on resources and its response to reduced resource levels might help to solve these questions. Whereas classical competition theory predicts competitive exclusion of species with similar requirements, recent ideas stress that species diversity may be explained by a multitude of processes acting at different scales, and that similarities in competitive abilities often may facilitate coexistence.
A model is presented giving conditions for competitive coexistence on a single resource with seasonal productivity. It is assumed that individuals can allocate time to foraging ...
Harsh conditions (e.g., mortality and stress) reduce population growth rates directly; secondarily, they may reduce the intensity of interactions between organisms. Near-exclusi...
This article discusses two types of proposed relationships between resource productivity and the diversity of coexisting consumer species. Monotonically increasing curves have r...
A species-addition experiment showed that prairie grasslands have a structured, nonneutral assembly process in which resident species inhibit, via resource consumption, the esta...
Competition in a temporally variable environment leads to sequences of short-term instabilities that in some cases are the mechanism of long-term coexistence; in other cases the...
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