The contribution of deterministic and stochastic processes to species coexistence is widely debated. With the introduction of powerful statistical techniques, we can now better characterise different sources of uncertainty when quantifying niche differentiation. The theoretical literature on the effect of stochasticity on coexistence, however, is often ignored by field ecologists because of its...

Plants live in a social environment, with interactions among neighbours a ubiquitous aspect of life. Though many of these interactions occur in the soil, our understanding of how plants alter root growth and the patterns of soil occupancy in response to neighbours is limited. This is in contrast to a rich literature on the animal behavioural responses to changes in the social environment. For p...

The association between species richness and ecosystem energy availability is one of the major geographic trends in biodiversity. It is often explained in terms of energetic constraints, such that coexistence among competing species is limited in low productivity environments. However, it has proven challenging to reject alternative views, including the null hypothesis that species richness has...

I investigated mechanisms of parasitoid coexistence in a spatially structured host–multiparasitoid community (harlequin bugs [Murgantia histrionica] and two specialist parasitoids [Trissolcus murgantiae and Ooencyrtus johnsonii ]). I tested both local and metapopulation hypotheses. The local hypothesis, intraguild predation, predicts coexistence if the inferior larval competitor is superior at ...

The 2.4 GHz ISM band provides an attractive medium for developing tethered free applications based on current and proposed wireless standards. Since the ISM band is a shared spectrum allowing unlicensed operation of wireless services, coexistence between the wireless services needs to be considered to ensure performance requirements are maintained. A general method for evaluating coexistence is...

How biological diversity is generated and maintained is a fundamental question in ecology. Ecologists have delineated many mechanisms that can, in principle, favor species coexistence and hence maintain biodiversity. Most such coexistence mechanisms require or imply tradeoffs between different aspects of species performance. However, it remains unknown whether simple functional tradeoffs underl...

Models of competitive template replication, although basic for replicator dynamics and primordial evolution, have not yet taken different sequences explicitly into account, neither have they analyzed the effect of resource partitioning (feeding on different resources) on coexistence. Here we show by analytical and numerical calculations that Gause's principle of competitive exclusion holds for ...

The class of Groves mechanisms has been attracting much attention in mechanism design literature due to two attractive characteristics: utilitarian efficiency (also called social welfare maximization) and dominant strategy incentive compatibility. However, when strategic agents can create multiple fake identities and reveal more than one preference under them, a refined characteristic called fa...

Most terrestrial plant communities exhibit relatively high species diversity and many competitive species are ubiquitous. Many theoretical studies have been carried out to investigate the coexistence of a few competitive species and in most cases they suggest competitive exclusion. Theoretical studies have revealed that coexistence of even three or four species can be extremely difficult. It ha...

Negative frequency dependence resulting from interspecific interactions is considered a driving force in allowing the coexistence of competitors. While interactions between species and genotypes can also result in positive frequency dependence, positive frequency dependence has usually been credited with hastening the extinction of rare types and is not thought to contribute to coexistence. In ...