Dynamics of competition in uniform communities of trees

Earlier, as a result of processing maps of trees and crown projections of 90-year-old spruce stands in the Moscow suburbs, nonuniform trends of correlation coefficients between areas of tree crown projections and areas of Voronoi polygons was detected in a series of sites ranked by increasing coefficient of variation of stem diameter. The observed behavior was analyzed using an original two-dimensional model of the dynamics of a plant community. Theoretical measures of competition in a community, which base on the definition of competition show that the process of competition in relatively uniform communities is not uniform. The coefficients of correlation mentioned above can be considered as measures of competition and such competition is not regular or uniform especially in uniform communities. The latter circumstance gives possibility to estimate the duration of biomass growth of freely growing spruce in the Moscow suburbs for ≈1000 years. Because of limitation of a two-dimensional resource model some characteristics of communities, such as coefficients of variation and correlation features of neighborhoods, differ from experimental values rather significantly