The roles of spatial pattern and size variation in shaping height inequality of plant population.
Game-theoretic models predict that there is an ESS height for the plant population to which all individual plants should converge. To attain this conclusion, the neighborhood factors were assumed to be equal for all the individual plants, and the spatial pattern and size variation of population were left without consideration, which is clearly not right for the scenario of plant competition. We constructed a spatially-explicit, individual-based model to explore the impacts of spatial structure and size variation on individual plant's height and population's height hierarchies under the light competition. The monomorphic equilibrium of height that all the individual plants will converge to only exists for a population growing in a strictly uniform spatial pattern with no size variation. When the spatial pattern of the population is non-uniform or there's size variation among individual plants, the critical heights that individual plants will finally reach are different from each other, and the height inequality at the end of population growth will increase when the population's spatial pattern's degree of deviation from uniform and population's size variation increase. Our results argue strongly for the importance of spatial pattern and neighborhood effects in generating the diversity of population's height growth pattern.
MOE Key Laboratory of Cell Activities and Stress Adaptations, School of Life Science, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, Gansu, People's Republic of China.
Shu-Yan
SY
Chen
Zi-long
ZL
Chen
Peng
P
Guo
Chen-Chen
CC
Ding
Yu-xin
YX
Wang
Xiang-tai
XT
Wang
Jia-Lin
JL
Zhang
Peng
P
Jia
Gang
G
Wang
Sa
S
Xiao
D005075:Biological Evolution; D017753:Ecosystem; D005716:Game Theory; D055641:Mathematical Concepts; D008954:Models, Biological; D052817:Phototrophic Processes; D063245:Plant Development; D010944:Plants / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D014197:Trees / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000254:growth & development