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Multistability is common feature resulting in nonlinear dynamical systems, and its characteristic can be generally depicted by investigating basin structures of initial conditions for give parameter settings. In this paper, we explore the formation of extinction states according to the change of strength of competition levels in the toy model for three species. Through the linear stability analysis, we find that the extinction state can be stable which is persistent. For specific conditions between intensities of two different competitions, we also found that the extinction state can be either bistable or tristable. In each case, the final state of the system can be characterized sensitively depending on initial conditions. To validate our results, we investigate basin structures of parameters for interspecific competition associated to a strength of intraspecific competition. In addition, we found that coexistence becomes robust as intraspecific competition is intensified relatively to the interspecific competition level. We hope our results can be a chance to suggest the emergence of the multistability according to complex competition structures on systems of many populations.

Asymmetrical rock-paper-scissors (RPS) competition has been perceived as a crucial factor in shaping species biodiversity, and understanding this ecological issue in a multi-species paradigm is rather difficult because community dynamics usually depend on distinct factors such as abiotic environments, biotic interactions and symmetry-breaking phenomenon. To address this problem, we employ a Lotka-Volterra competitive system consisting of both symmetrical, asymmetrical interactions and abiotic environment components. We discover that that asymmetrical RPS competition in heterogeneous environments can yield much richer dynamical behaviors, compared to the symmetrical and asymmetrical competition in homogeneous environments. While it is observed that species coexistence outcomes and/or oscillatory solutions are maintained as in the case of homogeneous environments, the nonuniformity in the environmental carrying capacities may lead to extra dynamics with regards to the appearance of survival states; for instance, coexistence of any two-species and single-species persistence states, which are not evident in the previous modelling studies. By means of bifurcation analysis, various salient features of the dynamical systems, including the emergence of certain attractors (e.g., different steady states, stable limit cycles and heteroclinic cycles) and co-dimension one bifurcations (e.g., transcritical and supercritical Hopf bifurcations) are realized in this ecological model. Overall, this modelling work provides a novel attempt to simultaneously encompass not only symmetry-breaking phenomenon through RPS competition, but also heterogeneity in the environments. This framework can provide additional insights to better understand various mechanisms underlying the effects of distinct ecological processes on multi-species communities.

One of the common assumptions in previous spatial dynamics of cyclic competition is that, regardless of competing structure and strength among species, the spatial size of a network is considered as large as possible to avoid finite size effect for species biodiversity. In real ecosystems, however, species richness, which can be defined by spatial size and competition strength, can sensitively affect species coexistence as a competition among individuals becomes complicated. In this paper, we investigate the structural stability of coexistence of mobile species in three cyclic competition games due to network complexity in which imposes a size of a square lattice and competition strength among species. By exploiting the coexistence probability, our computations quantitatively reveal that the network complexity due to changes in the competition rate and lattice size can strongly affect the structural stability of coexistence in each model. In particular, intense intraspecific competition can yield the robust coexistence at small-sized lattices regardless of mobility, and strengthening interspecific competition simultaneously induces changes in critical mobility that hampers coexistence and in spatial size for stable coexistence. Qualitatively, we find that such structural stability of coexistence relates to the degree of stability of fixed points in deterministic systems. Our finding can be useful to gain insights into species coexistence on spatially extended systems with respect to network complexity.