The influence of environmental forcing on biodiversity and extinction in a resource competition model

Chaos. 2018 Mar;28(3):031101. doi: 10.1063/1.5017233.

Abstract

In this paper, we study a model of many species that compete, directly or indirectly, for a pool of common resources under the influence of periodic, stochastic, and/or chaotic environmental forcing. Using numerical simulations, we find the number and sequence of species going extinct when the community is initially packed with a large number of species of random initial densities. Thereby, any species with a density below a given threshold is regarded to be extinct.

MeSH terms

  • Biodiversity*
  • Competitive Behavior*
  • Extinction, Biological*
  • Models, Biological*
  • Nonlinear Dynamics
  • Species Specificity