The demographic processes of growth, mortality, and the recruitment of young individuals,
are the major organizing forces regulating communities in open systems. Here we present a
size-structured (rather than age-structured) population model to examine the role of these
different processes in space-limited open systems, taking coral reefs as an example. In this
flux-diffusion model the growth rate of corals depends both on the available free-space (ie
density-dependence) and on the particular size of the coral. In our analysis we progressively …