Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 2: Computational Biophysics I

BP 2.6: Talk

Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:45–11:00, BAR/0106

Coexistence in competition for shared resources with fluctuating fitness — •Angelique Burdinski and Dirk Brockmann — Center Synergy of Systems (Synosys), TUD Dresden University of Technology, 01069, Dresden, Germany

Understanding how species coexist in competitive scenarios has long been a central question in ecology and evolution. The contradiction between the competitive exclusion principle and the observed diversity of species has puzzled researchers for decades. Fluctuating environmental factors that selectively change species fitness have been proposed to stabilize coexistence, but theoretical results remain inconclusive. How competitive forces and temporal variability shape evolutionary outcomes remains debated, with model-specific results and few universal insights. We compare species dynamics under two generic but qualitatively different mechanisms. One model captures direct competition via the standard replicator equation; the other represents a consumer-resource system, yielding the adjusted replicator model. Under uniform fitness, both show identical asymptotics, diverging sharply when fitness fluctuates. The standard replicator leads to quasi-fixation of a single species, whereas the adjusted replicator exhibits stable coexistence below a critical timescale. We derive coexistence bounds based on the mean and variance of fitness, showing that higher mean and lower variability favor fixation, while coexistence may persist even in disadvantaged situations. This contrast reflects direct versus indirect competition and supports coexistence as a generic outcome of shared-resource interactions in temporally varying environments.

Keywords: replicator equation; coexistence; stochastic environment; competition; population dynamics