Higher order interactions and species coexistence
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Higher order interactions and species coexistence Pragya Singh 1 & Gaurav Baruah 2,3 Received: 12 February 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Higher order interactions (HOIs) have been suggested to stabilize diverse ecological communities. However, their role in maintaining species coexistence from the perspective of modern coexistence theory is not known. Here, using generalized Lotka-Volterra model, we derive a general rule for species coexistence modulated by HOIs. We show that where pairwise species interactions fail to promote species coexistence in regions of extreme fitness differences, negative HOIs that intensify pairwise competition, however, can promote coexistence provided that HOIs strengthen intraspecific competition more than interspecific competition. In contrast, positive HOIs that alleviate pairwise competition can stabilize coexistence across a wide range of fitness differences, irrespective of differences in strength of inter- and intraspecific competition. In addition, we extend our three-species analytical result to multispecies communities and show, using simulations, that multispecies coexistence is possible provided that strength of negative intraspecific HOIs is higher than interspecific HOIs. Our work sheds light on the underlying mechanisms through which HOIs can maintain species diversity. Keywords Species coexistence . Higher order interactions . Modern coexistence theory . Pairwise interactions . Weyl’s inequality . Lotka-Volterra equations . Competition
Introduction In diverse ecological communities, species interact with other species in the community temporally (Li and Chesson 2016) and/or spatially (Hart et al. 2017). Understanding the mechanisms behind maintenance of species diversity has been one of the central goals of ecological research for decades (Levine et al. 2017). While our primary understanding of species coexistence empirically and theoretically has mostly come from study of species pairs Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00481-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Gaurav Baruah [email protected] 1
Department of Zoology, University of Basel, Vesalgasse 1, 4051 Basel, Switzerland
2
Department of Fish Ecology and Evolution, Center for Ecology Evolution and Biogeochemistry, Eawag, Seestrasse 79, 6047 Kastanienbaum, Switzerland
3
Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, 8057 zurich, Switzerland
(Chesson 2000; Barabás et al. 2012; Kraft et al. 2015; Hart et al. 2016), understanding the dynamics and coexistence of multiple species from the viewpoint of species pairs becomes unfeasible as species richness increases (Barabás et al. 2016; Bairey et al. 2016). In competition models, the underlying processes that facilitate species coexistence require parameter trade-offs in competitive interactions to stabilize multispecies coexist
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