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A Neighborhood Model of Annual‐Plant Interference
Author(s) -
Weiner Jacob
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.144
H-Index - 294
eISSN - 1939-9170
pISSN - 0012-9658
DOI - 10.2307/1938849
Subject(s) - competition (biology) , monoculture , ecology , mathematics , inverse , population , production (economics) , annual plant , statistics , biology , demography , geometry , economics , macroeconomics , sociology
A model is constructed in which seed production by individual annual plants within a population is a function of the number and species of individuals within each of several concentric neighborhoods. The effect of increasing competition is to reduce seed production in a hyperbolic fashion, and the contribution of each individual to this effect is inverse proportion to the square of its distance from the test individual. A simple monospecific version of this model was tested on populations of two annual knotweeds. A least—squares fit of the model accounted for over 80% of the variation in seed production. This model provides an alternative to density in describing plant populations. A monospecific aggregated version can be seen as an extension of the inverse—yield law, which has been widely applied to monocultures.