competition for time: evidence for an overlooked, diversity-maintaining competitive mechanism

Understanding how diversity is maintained in plant communities requires that we first understand the mechanisms of competition for limiting resources. In ecology, there is an underappreciated, but fundamental distinction between systems in which the depletion of limiting resources reduces the growth rates of competitors versus systems in which resource depletion reduces the time available for competitors to grow, a mechanism we call “competition for time.” Importantly, modern community ecology, and our framing of the coexistence problem are built on the implicit assumption that competition reduces the growth rate. However, recent theoretical work suggests competition for time may be the predominant competitive mechanism in a broad array of natural communities, a significant advance given coexistence follows naturally when species compete for time. In this study we first introduce competition for time conceptually using a simple model of interacting species. Then, we perform an experimen..., Please see the appendix of the associated manuscript for details on methodology and data processing. , , # Data and code repository supporting \"Competition for time: evidence for an overlooked, diversity-maintaining competitive mechanism\"

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*Overview of repository contents*

Data and code archive for:
Competition for time: evidence for an overlooked, diversity-maintaining competitive mechanism

by Jacob I. Levine, Stephen W. Pacala, and Jonathan M. Levine

This repository contains data generated from the experiment described in the main manuscript and appendices, as well as code to reproduce all analyses and generate all figures from the text. The repository is divided into three main directories: `/code`, which contains all the scripts used to clean data, perform analyses, and generate figures from the manuscript and appendix; `/scanned_data`, which contains scanned copies of the original datasheets from the experiment; and `/entered_data`, which contains all the digitized raw data, as well as repositories which are populated with results from the analysis and data-cleaning code in `/...