Resistance of a terrestrial plant community to local microhabitat changes

Abstract

The number of plant and animal species that exist today is estimated to be around 8.7 million. Approximately 300,000 of these species are flora. This extremely high species diversity has been puzzling scientist since the beginning of ecological research because most of these species compete for limited resources that should lead to the exclusion of all but few superior species. This can be seen in a number of coexistence model today that can only maintain at most four species at a time. We have shown recently that by incorporating minute differences in microhabitat to a lattice competition model, about 13 species can coexist from an initial number of 20. Here, we improve the model further by considering that microhabitat differences are not fixed but can change over time which can affect coexistence. A primary driver to this alteration is climate change, both natural and human induced. To show the resistance of a lattice plant community model, a dynamic microhabitat locality is incorporated by changing the spatial and species‐specific heterogeneity of each lattice site. We show that even if the microhabitat locality of each plant species is dynamic, diversity can still be maintained in a lattice plant ecosystem model. This shows that natural communities of terrestrial plants can be resistant to the stress of microhabitat locality changes to a certain extent.

Effects of Tree Cutting to a Simulated Two-dimensional Lattice Lotka-Volterra Model of a Terrestrial Plant Community with Microhabitat Locality

“…This model was extended to variants of the lattice Lotka-Volterra model, in which stochasticity and spatio-temporal relationships were included (Chen and Täuber 2016). A lattice is a two-dimensional system that represents the space occupied by a biological community and a lattice site represents a small space occupied by one individual of a species (Tubay and Yoshimura 2018).…”