Journal
JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY
Volume 262, Issue 4, Pages 584-595Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2009.10.018
Keywords
Succession; Nonequilibrium dynamics; Theory; Seasonality
Categories
Funding
- NSF [DEB-0610532]
- James S. McDonnell Foundation
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0845825] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Communities and ecosystems are often far from equilibrium, but our understanding of nonequilibrium dynamics has been hampered by a paucity of analytical tools. Here I describe a novel approach to modeling seasonally forced food webs, called successional state dynamics (SSD). It is applicable to communities where species dynamics are fast relative to the external forcing, such as plankton and other microbes, diseases, and some insect communities. The approach treats succession as a series of state transitions driven by both the internal dynamics of species interactions and external forcing. First, I motivate the approach with numerical solutions of a seasonally forced predator-prey model. Second, I describe how to set up and analyze an SSD model. Finally, I apply the techniques to three additional models of two-species interactions: resource competition (r-K selection), facilitation, and flip-flop competition (where the competitive hierarchy alternates over time). This approach allows easy and thorough exploration of how dynamics depend on the environmental forcing regime, and uncovers unexpected phenomena such as multiple stable annual trajectories and year-to-year irregularity in successional trajectories (chaos). (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available