COEXISTENCE OF SIMILAR SPECIES IN MODELS WITH PERIODIC ENVIRONMENTS

Models with periodically changing environments are investigated. It is demonstrated that an arbitrary number of competitors for a single limited resource can coexist. Trade-off conditions for growth or mortality parameters, which enable temporal organization of the competing species within the environmental period, are necessary to coexistence. No limit for similarity is observed in the models. An attempt is made to formulate a general coexistence principle for similar species in periodically changing environments.