Biomass-diversity relationship.

When interspecific competition is lower than intraspecific competition several species can make up more biomass than a single species on a given amount of resource. The total biomass made up by 100 species decreases with increasing interspecific competition strength (left hand panel). Here it is complementarity that increases the productivity in the system. When competition is stronger (high α_i,j), a few species quickly make up the total biomass (right hand panel). This also illustrates how when competition is high, the decrease in biomass with diversity loss happens more suddenly and at a lower diversity (dashed lines).