Related papers: Regulation of community functional composition acr…
A fundamental goal of microbial ecology is to understand what determines the diversity, stability, and structure of microbial ecosystems. The microbial context poses special conceptual challenges because of the strong mutual influences…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
The dynamics of microbial communities is incredibly complex, determined by competition for metabolic substrates and cross-feeding of byproducts. Species in the community grow by harvesting energy from chemical reactions that transform…
The competition for resources is a defining feature of microbial communities. In many contexts, from soils to host-associated communities, highly diverse microbes are organized into metabolic groups or guilds with similar resource…
The composition of ecological communities varies not only between different locations but also in time. Understanding the fundamental processes that drive species towards rarity or abundance is crucial to assessing ecosystem resilience and…
Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…
The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types…
The twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss define a strong need for functional diversity monitoring. While the availability of high-quality ecological monitoring data is increasing, the quantification of functional diversity so…
Species-rich communities, such as the microbiota or microbial ecosystems, provide key functions for human health and climatic resilience. Increasing effort is being dedicated to design experimental protocols for selecting community-level…
Microbial populations exhibit a broad spectrum of nutrient utilization strategies, ranging from strategies utilizing diverse nutrients, called "generalists," to those being highly adapted to specific nutrients, called "specialists." The…
The rapid advancement of environmental sequencing technologies, such as metagenomics, has significantly enhanced our ability to study microbial communities. The eubiotic composition of these communities is crucial for maintaining ecological…
Dynamics of species' abundances in ecological communities are often described using models that only account for a few species. It is not clear when and why this would be possible, as most species form part of diverse ecological…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Surveys of microbial biodiversity such as the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) and the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) have revealed robust ecological patterns across different environments. A major goal in ecology is to leverage these…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
Character evolution that affects ecological community interactions often occurs contemporaneously with temporal changes in population size, potentially altering the very nature of those dynamics. Such eco-evolutionary processes may be most…
A major challenge for community ecology is using spatio-temporal data to infer parameters of dynamical models without conducting laborious experiments. We present a novel framework from statistical physics -- Maximum Caliber -- to…
Spatial structure and species interactions jointly shape the dynamics and biodiversity of ecological systems, yet most theoretical models either neglect spatial heterogeneity or sacrifice analytical tractability. Here, we provide a unified…