The effect of growth rate on diversity in a community assembly model

This study uses a community assembly model with difference equations to model the origins of biodiversity. It is found that the growth rates of the species in the species pool has a large impact both on the number of species in a stable endpoint and on the number of possible endpoints of the model. Previous results that community assembly selects species from the pool with, on average, smaller interaction values are confirmed. It is also found that, if the species pool has a bimodal distribution of interaction values, the endpoint population will also have a bimodal distribution of interaction values.