Habitat destruction and competitive coexistence in spatially explicit models with local interactions

We investigate the competition-colonization trade-off in a two-species competition model in various heterogeneous environments. The competitiveness of species is hierarchically ordered and the dynamics of the model are described by spatially local interactions of individuals. The size of the local neighborhood may depend on the species. The habitat consists of inhabitable and permanently destroyed sites. It was previously observed that destruction of habitat may aid the inferior species and cause the superior species to go extinct. These conclusions were based on an n-species model in which the spatial arrangement of destroyed sites was ignored. We examine the effects of different spatial arrangements of destroyed sites on survival and coexistence of the two species. We conclude that the spatial arrangement plays an important role and can influence the outcome qualitatively and quantitatively. The key quantity for predicting the outcome of habitat destruction on species survival is the relationship between the mean dispersal distance and the mean distance between inhabitable and destroyed sites. We contrast the hierarchical model with a version of the Lotka-Volterra model of interspecific competition and show that habitat destruction can alter the dominance relationship between species by reducing intraspecific competition.