  We study the properties of Lotka-Volterra competitive models in which the
intensity of the interaction among species depends on their position along an
abstract niche space through a competition kernel. We show analytically and
numerically that the properties of these models change dramatically when the
Fourier transform of this kernel is not positive definite, due to a pattern
forming instability. We estimate properties of the species distributions, such
as the steady number of species and their spacings, for different types of
kernels.
