Models of Ecological Fitting
Abstract
Ecological fitting describes a situation where species interact despite no shared evolutionary history. It is both a null model for adaptation and an important process in its own right, for example, the establishment of a non-native species is ecological fitting, and it is a major mechanism in the formation of Novel Ecosystems. In this paper we introduce and analyse a model of ecological fitting. We demonstrate both analytically and through simulation that the main factors determining invasion success are the invaded ecosystem's population and diversity, which set the size of the barrier for invaders. We also study the situation where many evolutionarily unrelated species simultaneously colonise an empty area. We show that a successful equilibrium is likely to be established, but the diversity tends to be very much less than the number of species in the starting pool and discuss the implications of this.
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BibTeX
@misc{arthur2026models,
title = {{Models of Ecological Fitting}},
author = {Rudy Arthur and Arwen Nicholson and David M Wilkinson},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.34956},
eprint = {2609.34956},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34956},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Models of Ecological Fitting
AU - Rudy Arthur
AU - Arwen Nicholson
AU - David M Wilkinson
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.34956
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34956
AB - Ecological fitting describes a situation where species interact despite no shared evolutionary history. It is both a null model for adaptation and an important process in its own right, for example, the establishment of a non-native species is ecological fitting, and it is a major mechanism in the formation of Novel Ecosystems. In this paper we introduce and analyse a model of ecological fitting. We demonstrate both analytically and through simulation that the main factors determining invasion success are the invaded ecosystem's population and diversity, which set the size of the barrier for invaders. We also study the situation where many evolutionarily unrelated species simultaneously colonise an empty area. We show that a successful equilibrium is likely to be established, but the diversity tends to be very much less than the number of species in the starting pool and discuss the implications of this.
ER -