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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Quantifying And Simulating Fine-Scale Spatial Patterns In Plant Populations, Darin Schulte
Quantifying And Simulating Fine-Scale Spatial Patterns In Plant Populations, Darin Schulte
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Plant ecology as a discipline has increasingly acknowledged the importance of fine-scale spatial patterns in developing our understanding of community/population dynamics. These spatial patterns are largely determined by direct and indirect interactions between plants and their immediate neighbors. Such interactions thus play an important role in the structure and function of plant communities. Study of these types of local interactions has greatly benefitted from simulation based approaches. one such simulation method, agent-based modeling, has increasingly been identified as a useful tool for simulating these fine-scale interactions, and for investigating theoretical descriptions of underlying processes. Similarly, statistical techniques aimed at quantifying …
Competition And Community Interactions Of Two Generalist Herbivores, Elizabeth Ellen Barnes
Competition And Community Interactions Of Two Generalist Herbivores, Elizabeth Ellen Barnes
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Competition can have far-reaching consequences for the fitness and distribution of many organisms. In herbivorous insects, competition mediated by a third organism is more common than direct competition and has a strong effect on insect communities; yet most research on indirect competition among herbivores focuses on dietary specialists, and those studies that do include generalists tend to rear them on agricultural crops. My project examines species interactions at three levels: intraspecific competition (within species), interspecific competition (between species), and ecosystem engineering effects at the community level. I studied competition and community interactions of two temporally-separated species of herbivorous insects, western …