This research will provide important contributions to both empirical and theoretical research areas in the field of ecology. This work also represents an important development and extension of individual-based simulations of ecological systems, which is an increasingly popular theoretical approach. The research will build upon past modeling work that used a simple analytic resource-consumer model that examined two consumer species competing for a common structure resource. The goal of this proposal is to uncover the individual-scale interactions and processes that lead to evolutionarily stable coexistence of exploitation competitors. It will develop criteria and make predictions to classify and compare empirical systems according to coexistence expectations. Or in other words, is there a critically important feature that determines coexistence and do empirical systems with and without this feature conform to the resultant coexistence predictions? This research represents an important and extension of simulations of ecological systems in which simulation models are used in conjunction with a range of analytic models to maximize theoretical insight.
