TOWARDS QUANTITATIVE FORECASTING OF SPECIES YIELDS WITH INCOMPLETE INFORMATION ON MODEL PARAMETERS

Abstract Predicting both the absolute and the relative abundance of species in a spatial patch is of paramount interest in areas like, agriculture, ecology and environmental science. The linear Lotka-Volterra generalized equations (LLVGE) serve for describing the dynamics of communities of species connected by negative as well as positive interspecific interactions. Here we particularize these LLVGE to the case of single trophic ecological communities, like mixtures of plants, with S >2 species. Thus, by estimating the LLVGE parameters from the yields in monoculture and biculture experiments, the LLVGE are able to produce decently accurate predictions for species yields. However, a common situation we face is that we don’t know all the parameters appearing in the LLVGE. Indeed, for large values of S, only a fraction of the experiments necessary for estimating the model parameters is commonly carried out. We then analyze which quantitative predictions are possible with an incomplete knowledge of the parameters.