Life Sciences Commons^™

From Energy Gradient And Natural Selection To Biodiversity And Stability Of Ecosystems, Bo Deng

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate well-established ecological principles into a foodweb model consisting of four trophic levels --- abiotic resources, plants, herbivores, and carnivores. The underlining principles include Kimura's neutral theory of genetic evolution, Liebig's Law of the Minimum for plant growth, Holling's functionals for herbivore foraging and carnivore predation, the One-Life Rule for all organisms, and Lotka-Volterra's model for intraand interspecific competitions. Numerical simulations of the model led to the following statistical findings: (a) particular foodwebs can give contradicting observations on biodiversity and productivity, in particular, all known functional forms -- - positive, negative, sigmoidal, and …