The role of space in the exploitation of resources
Yun Kang, Nicolas Lanchier

TL;DR
This paper investigates how spatial interactions influence resource exploitation in ecological communities, revealing that spatial models often diverge from mean-field predictions and significantly affect species coexistence.
Contribution
It demonstrates that spatial structure alters community dynamics, invalidates mean-field assumptions, and identifies mechanisms promoting coexistence in multi-species systems.
Findings
Spatial models differ from mean-field predictions across parameter ranges.
Local interactions can prevent coexistence even in cooperative communities.
Coexistence in three-species communities arises from cooperation, rock-paper-scissors dynamics, or their mixture.
Abstract
In order to understand the role of space in ecological communities where each species produces a certain type of resource and has varying abilities to exploit the resources produced by its own species and by the other species, we carry out a comparative study of an interacting particle system and its mean-field approximation. For a wide range of parameter values, we show both analytically and numerically that the spatial model results in predictions that significantly differ from its nonspatial counterpart, indicating that the use of the mean-field approach to describe the evolution of communities in which individuals only interact locally is invalid. In two-species communities, the disagreements between the models appear either when both species compete by producing resources that are more beneficial for their own species or when both species cooperate by producing resources that are…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEvolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolution and Genetic Dynamics · Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models
