Species clustering in competitive Lotka-Volterra models

Pigolotti, Simone; Lopez, Cristobal; Hernandez-Garcia, Emilio

Species clustering in competitive Lotka-Volterra models

Authors

Pigolotti, Simone

Lopez, Cristobal

Hernandez-Garcia, Emilio

Description

We study the properties of Lotka-Volterra competitive models in which the intensity of the interaction among species depends on their position along an abstract niche space through a competition kernel. We show analytically and numerically that the properties of these models change dramatically when the Fourier transform of this kernel is not positive definite, due to a pattern forming instability. We estimate properties of the species distributions, such as the steady number of species and their spacings, for different types of kernels.
4 pages, 3 figures