Statistics of extinction and survival in Lotka-Volterra systems

We analyze purely competitive many-species Lotka-Volterra systems with random interaction matrices, focusing the attention on statistical properties of their asymptotic states. Generic features of the evolution are outlined from a semiquantitative analysis of the phase-space structure and extensive numerical simulations are performed to study the statistics of the extinctions. We find that the number of surviving species depends strongly on the statistical properties of the interaction matrix and that the probability of survival is weakly correlated to specific initial conditions. @S1063-651X~98!03204-8#

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