A new dominance concept and its application to diversity-stability analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dominance concept with three metrics based on Lloyd's mean crowding index, linking community and species levels, and demonstrates its application in microbiome diversity-stability analysis.

Contribution

It presents new dominance metrics that connect community and species levels, expanding the tools for diversity-stability modeling and network reconstruction.

Findings

Metrics serve as proxies for diversity in stability models

Application to vaginal microbiome data offers insights into microbial stability

Metrics enable reconstruction of species dominance networks

Abstract

We introduce a new dominance concept consisting of three new dominance metrics based on Lloyd's (1967) mean crowding index. The new metrics link communities and species, whereas existing ones are applicable only to communities. Our community-level metric is a function of Simpson's diversity index. For species, our metric quantifies the difference between community dominance and the dominance of a virtual community whose mean population size (per species) equals the population size of the focal species. The new metrics have at least two immediate applications: (i) acting as proxies for diversity in diversity-stability modeling (ii) replacing population abundance in reconstructing species dominance networks. The first application is demonstrated here using data from a longitudinal study of the human vaginal microbiome, and provides new insights relevant for microbial community stability and disease etiology.