Mechanistic models of resource competition provide the basis for many theories and results in ecology.
They are especially important in microbial ecology, where experiments can directly address the mechanistic basis for competition, and readily modulate resources in the system.
However, existing software for resource competition modelling presents a steep barrier to entry; it's often little easier than directly specifying a differential equation.
I present rescomp, an R package designed to lower this barrier to entry, making specifying, simulating, and visualising resource competition models easy.
rescomp has built-in support for many different features of resource competition models: different functional responses, essential or substitutable resources, different resource supply dynamics, various environmental variables, and various events such as batch transfer, with even more features to come.
Nonetheless, it retains the ability to be extended to cover additional complications in models.
In this talk, I'll give a brief overview of the structure of resource competition models, show how to specify them in rescomp, and give a few examples of using rescomp to simulate and visualise these models.
I'll conclude with a demonstration of how rescomp can be used to very easily replicate some classical results in the field of resource competition.