Stochastic competitive exclusion leads to a cascade of species extinctions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating ecological drift into models of community assembly reveals a stochastic cascade of extinctions, contrasting with deterministic predictions of simultaneous species collapse, thus emphasizing the importance of stochasticity in ecology.

Contribution

It introduces analytical approximations showing how stochasticity causes sequential extinctions, challenging classical deterministic models in community ecology.

Findings

Stochastic models predict a cascade of extinctions.

Deterministic models predict simultaneous collapse.

Environmental stochasticity does not alter the cascade pattern.

Abstract

Community ecology has traditionally relied on the competitive exclusion principle, a piece of common wisdom in conceptual frameworks developed to describe species assemblages. Key concepts in community ecology, such as limiting similarity and niche partitioning, are based on competitive exclusion. However, this classical paradigm in ecology relies on implications derived from simple, deterministic models. Here we show how the predictions of a symmetric, deterministic model about the way extinctions proceed can be utterly different from the results derived from the same model when ecological drift (demographic stochasticity) is explicitly considered. Using analytical approximations to the steady-state conditional probabilities for assemblages with two and three species, we demonstrate that stochastic competitive exclusion leads to a cascade of extinctions, whereas the symmetric, deterministic model predicts a multiple collapse of species. To test the robustness of our results, we have studied the effect of environmental stochasticity and relaxed the species symmetry assumption. Our conclusions highlight the crucial role of stochasticity when deriving reliable theoretical predictions for species community assembly.