Generalizing clusters of similar species as a signature of coexistence under competition
Fig 2
Abundance-by-trait pattern across niche mechanisms.
For each scenario (A-H) we show one representative replicate. All communities with a niche mechanism (A-G) are clustered at the p < 0.05 level, while the neutral community (H) is not (p = 0.1). Alternating black and red colors highlight the clusters. We truncate the y-axis in the competition-colonization tradeoff scenario (G) to better show abundance structure among rare species. (Immigration rate m = 0.08, regional diversity c. 400 species. All communities had 21,000 individuals, except in the partitioning environment scenario, which had 1,000 individuals. Parameters of niche models were tuned so that without stochasticity and immigration they would produce about 13 transient clusters, and eventually 13 species stably coexisting at equilibrium).