The need for alternative plant species interaction models

AimsThe limitations of classical Lotka–Volterra models for analyzing and interpreting competitive interactions among plant species have become increasingly clear in recent years. Three of the problems that have been identified are (i) the absence of frequency-dependence, which is important for long-term coexistence of species, (ii) the need to take unmeasured (often unmeasurable) variables influencing individual performance into account (e.g. spatial variation in soil nutrients or pathogens) and (iii) the need to separate measurement error from biological variation.