  Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of
the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate
trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the
evolution of life. This is key to the understanding of species coexistence and
ecosystem diversity under the omnipresent constraint of limited resources. In
this work we propose an agent based model replicating a community of
interacting individuals, e.g. plants in a forest, where all are competing for
the same finite amount of resources and each competitor is characterized by a
specific growth-reproduction strategy. We show that such an evolution dynamics
drives the system towards a stationary state characterized by an emergent
optimal strategy, which in turn depends on the amount of available resources
the ecosystem can rely on. We find that the share of resources used by
individuals is power-law distributed with an exponent directly related to the
optimal strategy. The model can be further generalized to devise optimal
strategies in social and economical interacting systems dynamics.
