Related papers: Inferring resource competition in microbial commun…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
We used a metacommunity of 49 discrete communities of aquatic invertebrates to analyze the dynamical relationship between community and metacommunity species distributions as a test of the neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. At…
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…
Progress in molecular methods has enabled the monitoring of bacterial populations in time. Nevertheless, understanding community dynamics and its links with ecosystem functioning remains challenging due to the tremendous diversity of…
An active area of research interest is the inference of ecological models of complex microbial communities. Inferring such ecological models entails understanding the interactions between microbes and how they affect each other's growth.…
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…
Why, contrary to theoretical predictions, do marine microbe communities harbor tremendous phenotypic heterogeneity? How can so many marine microbe species competing in the same niche coexist? We discovered a unifying explanation for both…
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…
Population-level scaling in ecological systems arises from individual growth and death with competitive constraints. We build on a minimal dynamical model of metabolic growth where the tension between individual growth and mortality…
The maintenance of diversity in complex ecological communities despite unpredictable dynamics and competitive exclusion is thought to require continual influx of new species or competitive advantages that accrue as species become rare. We…
Microbial communities are diverse biological systems that include taxa from across multiple kingdoms of life. Notably, interactions between bacteria and fungi play a significant role in determining community structure. However, these…
The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and…
One of the central questions of metacommunity theory is how dispersal of organisms affects species diversity. Here we show that the diversity-dispersal relationship should not be studied in isolation of other abiotic and biotic flows in the…
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…
The ecological principle of limiting similarity dictates that species similar in resource requirements will compete, with the superior eventually excluding the inferior competitor from the community. The observation that nonetheless…
Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…
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…
This study investigates the effect of competition between individuals on population dynamics when they compete for different resources during different seasons or during different growth stages. Individuals are assumed to compete for a…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
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…