At what scales does aggregated dispersal lead to coexistence?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Marine Biology, Mathematical Biology
- Keywords
- aggregated dispersal, coexistence, spatial ecology, metacommunities, stochasticity, dispersal, stochastic dispersal, ecological scales
- Copyright
- © 2016 Pedersen et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. At what scales does aggregated dispersal lead to coexistence? PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1734v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1734v1
Abstract
Aggregation during dispersal from source to settlement sites can allow persistence of weak competitors, by creating conditions where stronger competitors are more likely to interact with conspecifics than with less competitive heterospecifics. However, different aggregation mechanisms across scales can lead to very different patterns of settlement. Little is known about what ecological conditions are required for this mechanism to work effectively. We derive a metacommunity approximation of aggregated dispersal that shows how three different scales interact to determine competitive outcomes: the spatial scale of aggregation, the spatial scale of interactions between individuals, and the time-scale of arrival rates of aggregations. We use stochastic simulations and a novel metacommunity approximation to show that an inferior competitor can invade only when the superior competitor is aggregated over short spatial scales, and aggregations of new settlers are small and rare.
Author Comment
This paper aims to generalize work in ecology on the stabilizing effects aggregated dispersal (where individuals dispersal in groups rather than following individual trajectories) to cases where competing species do not interact on the same scale as one another, on the scale that they are aggregated on.