Coexistence of competing vegetation species due to self organized patchiness

Background/Question/Methods

The principle of competitive exclusion states that the number of competing species is restricted by the number of limiting resources. Through the years this principle elicited interest in ideas aiming to explain the contradicting observation in many systems, including vegetation, that the number of competing species is larger than the number of resources. These ideas are mostly based on heterogeneity of space and time, and non-linearity of the growth or mortality terms.

Results/Conclusions

We suggest that even in a uniform environment in space and in time, and linear growth and mortality functions of the different species, self emergent patterns may induce coexistence of two species competing on one resource. We show an example of this phenomena in a simple PDE vegetation model, and map the parameter space to identify regions of coexistence and other special behaviors induced by pattern formation such as total extinction and immunity to invasion of a better competitor.