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Summary: Notes
3226
Ecology, 81(11), 2000, pp. 32263232
2000 by the Ecological Society of America
IS SPACE NECESSARY? INTERFERENCE COMPETITION
AND LIMITS TO BIODIVERSITY
FREDERICK R. ADLER1,4
AND JULIO MOSQUERA2,3
1
Department of Mathematics and Department of Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 USA
2Group of Nonlinear Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Santiago de Compostela,
15706 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Abstract. A single trade-off between competitive ability and mortality has been shown
to support an arbitrarily large number of species in models of interference competition in
spatially structured populations. We show that this results not from spatial structure, but
instead from the assumption that a small difference in mortality translates into a large
difference in competitive ability. We present graphical criteria for recognizing functions
that support one, two, or more species. High levels of coexistence in models of this form
depend on a steep slope or a discontinuous second derivative of the function relating
mortality to competitiveness. These criteria are identical to those in models of interference
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