Quan-Guo Zhang^a,b, Da-Yong Zhang^a

^a State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology & MOE Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, PR China;

^b Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK.

 

Abstract: A ‘competitive hierarchies’ approach has been developed to predict the structure of multi-species communities based on species competitive abilities estimated in pair-wise competition experiments. However, it is yet unclear how generally multi-species competition can be a simple additive function of pair-wise interactions. Here we re-analyzed the data of two biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments, and constructed competitive hierarchies based on both pair-wise and multi-species competition. The competitive hierarchies inferred from multi-species competition experiments were fairly, although not perfectly, consistent with those from pair-wise competition, suggesting that the competitive hierarchies framework deserves more attention as a working approach to predicting the relative abundance of species in multi-species communities.

 

Keywords: Algae; Bacteria; Competitive hierarchies; Multi-species competition; Pair-wise competition.