Inferring species interactions in tropical forests.
We present 2 distinct and independent approaches to deduce the effective interaction strengths between species and apply it to the 20 most abundant species in the long-term 50-ha plot on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The first approach employs the principle of maximum entropy, and the second uses a stochastic birth-death model. Both approaches yield very similar answers and show that the collective effects of the pairwise interspecific interaction strengths are weak compared with the intraspecific interactions. Our approaches can be applied to other ecological communities in steady state to evaluate the extent to which interactions need to be incorporated into theoretical explanations for their structure and dynamics.
Volkov
Igor
I
Department of Physics, 104 Davey Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Banavar
Jayanth R
JR
Hubbell
Stephen P
SP
Maritan
Amos
A
D044822:Biodiversity; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D004463:Ecology; D017753:Ecosystem; D019277:Entropy; D053476:Extinction, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D010176:Panama; D011157:Population Dynamics; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D014197:Trees; D014329:Tropical Climate