Biodiversity, extinctions and evolution of ecosystems with shared resources

We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of coexisting species and find a relation describing how many species...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2017-03
Main Authors: Kozlov, V, Vakulenko, S, Wennergren, U
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biodiversity
Biological evolution
Differential equations
Ecological monitoring
Extinction
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Summary:We investigate the formation of stable ecological networks where many species share the same resource. We show that such stable ecosystem naturally occurs as a result of extinctions. We obtain an analytical relation for the number of coexisting species and find a relation describing how many species that may go extinct as a result of a sharp environmental change. We introduce a special parameter that is a combination of species traits and resource characteristics used in the model formulation. This parameter describes the pressure on system to converge, by extinctions. When that stress parameter is large we obtain that the species traits concentrate at some values. This stress parameter is thereby a parameter that determines the level of final biodiversity of the system. Moreover, we show that dynamics of this limit system can be described by simple differential equations.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1703.05490