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Issue 353: Competition in ecosystems involves interactions of individuals in space. Incorporating the crucial spatial scale in modelling ecological competition is necessary to understand how ecological communities assemble in nature. Inspired by evolutionary graph theory (EGT), we proposed ecological graph theory (EcoGT), which translates the classic Lotka–Volterra model into a graph-based framework. We explored how spatial structure -represented by a dodecahedron, a king’s graph, or random graph -could influence the possibility of coexistence. Additionally, EcoGT can simulate competition between individuals on graphs that themselves change during simulation, a reflection of movement of the organism in the community. This method can be used to explore both the importance of space and trait variation, to understand how organisms (exemplified by nematodes in this cover) can coexist in the wild.