Plant Competition

Abstract

Among many other processes, local competitive interactions between plants may influence compositional and structural changes in plant communities. Most dynamic models of community assembly include intra- and interspecific competition, either in a phenomenological or a mechanistic way. Models of plant competition apply to individual organisms or populations. The simplest models are spatially implicit and use ordinary differential equations. The classical Lotka–Volterra competition model is based on the logistic growth of populations. Pair interactions among populations are represented by competition coefficients. The model predicts that stable coexistence occurs if intraspecific competition is stronger than interspecific competition. Nonspatial resource-reduction competition models predict that the number of coexisting species cannot exceed the number of limiting resources. However, multispecies–multiresource competition models may generate oscillations and chaos, which create opportunities for the coexistence of many species. Plant competition being a local process, spatial stochastic or deterministic models incorporating neighborhood interactions and dispersal predict that species coexistence requires interspecific tradeoffs among competitive ability, colonization ability and longevity, or asymmetries in the distances over which plants disperse and compete. Community-level features, such as competitive replacements along gradients of resource and disturbance, can emerge from a simple cellular automaton model of self-assembling modular plants.