PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Chuliang Song
AU  - Lawrence H. Uricchio
AU  - Erin A. Mordecai
AU  - Serguei Saavedra
TI  - Understanding the emergence of contingent and deterministic exclusion in multispecies communities
AID  - 10.1101/2020.09.23.310524
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.09.23.310524
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/26/2020.09.23.310524.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/26/2020.09.23.310524.full
AB  - Competitive exclusion can be classified as deterministic or as historically contingent. While competitive exclusion is common in nature, it has remained unclear when multispecies communities should be dominated by deterministic or contingent exclusion. Here, we provide a general theoretical approach to explain both the emergence and sources of competitive exclusion in multispecies communities. We illustrate our approach on an empirical competition system between annual and perennial plant species. First, we find that the life-history of perennial species increases the probability of observing contingent exclusion by increasing their effective intrinsic growth rates. Second, we find that the probability of observing contingent exclusion increases with weaker intraspecific competition, and not with the level of hierarchical competition. Third, we find a shift from contingent exclusion to dominance with increasing numbers of competing species. Our work provides a heuristic framework to increase our understanding about the predictability of species persistence within multispecies communities.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.