Environmental context, parameter sensitivity and structural sensitivity impact predictions of annual-plant coexistence

Abstract

Predicting the outcome of interactions between species is central to our current understanding of diversity maintenance. However, we have limited information about the robustness of many model-based predictions of species coexistence. This limitation is partly because several sources of uncertainty are often ignored when making predictions. Here, we introduce a framework to simultaneously explore how different mathematical models, different environmental contexts, and parameter uncertainty impact the probability of predicting species coexistence. Using a set of pairwise competition experiments on annual plants, we provide direct evidence that subtle differences between models lead to contrasting predictions of both coexistence and competitive exclusion. We also show that the effects of environmental context-dependency and parameter uncertainty on predictions of species coexistence are not independent of the model used to describe population dynamics. Our work suggests that predictions of species coexistence and extrapolations thereof may be particularly vulnerable to these underappreciated founts of uncertainty.