The effect of resource dynamics on species packing in diverse ecosystems

Abstract

The competitive exclusion principle asserts that coexisting species must occupy distinct ecological niches (i.e. the number of surviving species can not exceed the number of resources). An open question is to understand if and how different resource dynamics affect this bound. Here, we analyze a generalized consumer resource model with externally supplied resources and show that - in contrast to self-renewing resources - species can occupy only half of all available environmental niches. This motivates us to construct a new schema for classifying ecosystems based on species packing properties.