Combining niche and game theories to address interspecific cooperation in ecological communities

Fort, Hugo (2020) Combining niche and game theories to address interspecific cooperation in ecological communities. Community Ecology, 21 (1). pp. 13-24. ISSN 1585-8553

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Abstract

Incorporating cooperative interspecific interactions into the classical Niche Theory has been identified as a big challenge of population and community ecology. Attempting to fill this gap I present the Lotka-Volterra Niche Game Model (LVNGM), resulting from the marriage between the classical Niche Theory and Game Theory. I use this new framework to analyze the effects of including cooperative interspecific interactions on two global properties of a community, its aggregate biomass or total yield and its biodiversity, measured by the Shannon equitability. I consider different dilemma games, games for which neither pure competition nor pure cooperation are dominant/optimal strategies, which are popular in biology: the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), the Snowdrift (SD) and the Stag-Hunt (SH) games. The main result is that these games lead to a higher total yield—which is maximum for the SD, followed by the PD and the SH in third place—and, generally, to a higher biodiversity than pure competition. LVNGM allows gaining insights into niche construction/engineering. Examples in which LVNGM can be applied range from several single-trophic natural communities, in which positive interactions have been detected, to overyielding of artificial polycultures and plant-pollinator networks.

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