The Hydrological Niche Plant Diversity Model in Water-limited Ecosystems
based on the Evolutionary Stability Theory
Abstract
The construction of a model that is capable to describe and explain
plant diversity is a key in community ecology, which is of great
significance in facilitating the analysis and protection of
biodiversity.In this paper, the evolutionary stability theory of
community water resources allocation is studied in ecologically stable
plant communities in water-limited environments, the water consumption
of individual biomass growth is used to quantify the hydrological niche
of the species, and the arithmetic mean and harmonic mean ratio of
hydrological niche of species in the community as a new diversity index
is used to measure the community hydrological niche differentiation. An
new hydrological niche plant diversity model was established, and the
species abundance curve and species area curve including the community
hydrological niche differentiation factor were obtained. Through our
model derivation and verification, we discovered that the distribution
of species abundance in water-limited ecosystems was close to Fisher log
series distribution, which unified and expanded the classical diversity
theories and discovered quantitative relationship: the larger the degree
of community hydrological niche differentiation is, the greater the
number of species is with the same abundance. This paper also provides
an example for the application of the theory of evolutionary stability
to community diversity research.