Most of the classical theory on species coexistence has been based on species-level competitive trade-offs. However, it is becoming apparent that plant species display high levels of trait plasticity. The implications of this plasticity are almost completely unknown for most coexistence theory. Here, we model a competition-colonisation trade-off and incorporate trait plasticity to evaluate its effects on coexistence. Our simulations show that the classic competition-colonisation trade-off is highly sensitive to environmental circumstances, and coexistence only occurs in narrow ranges of conditions. The inclusion of plasticity, which allows shifts in competitive hierarchies across the landscape, leads to coexistence across a much broader range of competitive and environmental conditions including disturbance levels, the magnitude of competitive differences between species, and landscape spatial patterning. Plasticity also increases the number of species that persist in simulations of multispecies assemblages. Plasticity may generally increase the robustness of coexistence mechanisms and be an important component of scaling coexistence theory to higher diversity communities.

中文翻译：

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性状可塑性改变了竞争-殖民化权衡中可能共存条件的范围。

关于物种共存的大多数经典理论都是基于物种层面的竞争权衡。但是，很明显，植物物种表现出高水平的性状可塑性。对于大多数共存理论，这种可塑性的含义几乎是完全未知的。在这里，我们模拟了竞争与殖民化之间的权衡，并结合了特征可塑性来评估其对共存的影响。我们的模拟表明，经典的竞争-殖民化权衡对环境非常敏感，并且共存仅在狭窄的条件范围内发生。包括可塑性在内，可以在整个景观中改变竞争等级，从而导致更广泛范围的竞争和环境条件共存，包括干扰水平，物种之间竞争差异的大小以及景观空间格局。可塑性还增加了在多物种组合的模拟中持续存在的物种数量。可塑性通常可以提高共存机制的鲁棒性，并且是将共存理论扩展到更高多样性社区的重要组成部分。