This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between
population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species
assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points
through the continuous introduction of new species, and generalize to such
models thecoexistence condition derived for systems at the fixed point. The
ecological overlap between species with shared preys, that we define here,
provides a quantitative measure of the effective interspecies competition and
of the trophic network topology. We obtain distributions of the overlap from
simulations of a new model based both on immigration and speciation, and show
that they are in good agreement with those measured for three large natural
food webs. As discussed in the first paper, rapid environmental fluctuations,
interacting with the condition for coexistence of competing species, limit the
maximal biodiversity that a trophic level can host. This horizontal limitation
to biodiversity is here combined with either dissipation of energy or growth of
fluctuations, which in our model limit the length of food webs in the vertical
direction. These ingredients yield an effective model of food webs that produce
a biodiversity profile with a maximum at an intermediate trophic level, in
agreement with field studies
