Abstract
Many species live in advective environments, such as rivers or streams. The community composition in such environments is shaped by the interplay between biotic interactions and hydrologic constraints. Lutscher et al. (Theor. Popul. Biol. 71:267–277, 2007) demonstrated by simulation that advective flow can shift competitive outcome from one species dominating to coexistence or even to the other species dominating. Here, we present a detailed analysis of the Lotka–Volterra advection-diffusion model underlying their simulations. We use variational techniques as well as a spatially implicit approximation to determine all possible advection-induced shifts in competitive outcome. We show that changes in advection follow relatively few and predictable paths. We illustrate our results in various bifurcation diagrams.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for insightful discussions with Mark Lewis, Alex Potapov, Roger Nisbet, and Ed McCauley. This work was supported by an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation to FL, and by the University of Ottawa. We also thank an anonymous reviewer for many helpful comments, in particular, for the ideas of proofs in Propositions 2.2(b) and 2.5, and for suggesting Remark 2.10.
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Vasilyeva, O., Lutscher, F. How Flow Speed Alters Competitive Outcome in Advective Environments. Bull Math Biol 74, 2935–2958 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-012-9792-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-012-9792-3