Niche Overlap and Invasion of Competitors in Random Environments II. The Effects of Demographic Stochasticity

Abstract

This paper treats a class of models and approximations that are useful for describing the dynamics of a rare species attempting to invade a community consisting of established resident competitors. Such dynamics are a central feature of faunal buildup via immigration and thus bear on the theory of island biogeography as well as the theory of the limiting similarity of competitors. The purpose of the models is to study the joint effects of interspecific competition, demographic stochasticity, and environmental stochasticity. Here “demographic stochasticity” refers to random individual to individual variation in offspring production; whereas “environmental stochasticity” refers to random variation in the mean per capita growth rate for the population as a whole.KeywordsInterspecific CompetitionSuccessful InvasionResident SpeciesMonte Carlo EstimatePersistence TimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.