Competitive hierarchies inferred from pair-wise and multi-species competition experiments

A ‘competitive hierarchies’ approach has been developed to predict the structure of multi-species communities based on species competitive abilities estimated in pair-wise competition experiments. However, it is yet unclear how generally multi-species competition can be a simple additive function of pair-wise interactions. Here we re-analyzed the data of two biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments, and constructed competitive hierarchies based on both pair-wise and multi-species competition. The competitive hierarchies inferred from multi-species competition experiments were fairly, although not perfectly, consistent with those from pair-wise competition, suggesting that the competitive hierarchies framework deserves more attention as a working approach to predicting the relative abundance of species in multi-species communities.