Environmental engineering is an emergent feature of diverse ecosystems and drives community structure

TL;DR

This paper develops a statistical physics-based method to analyze large ecosystems, revealing that environmental engineering by species significantly influences community structure and niche dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a cavity method to extend niche theory to large ecosystems with many species and resources, highlighting emergent environmental engineering effects.

Findings

Species perturb environments and modify niches in large ecosystems.

Environmental engineering is a common feature influencing community stability.

The approach generalizes niche theory to complex, large-scale ecological systems.

Abstract

A central question in ecology is to understand the ecological processes that shape community structure. Niche-based theories have emphasized the important role played by competition for maintaining species diversity. Many of these insights have been derived using MacArthur's consumer resource model (MCRM) or its generalizations. Most theoretical work on the MCRM has focused on small ecosystems with a few species and resources. However theoretical insights derived from small ecosystems many not scale up large ecosystems with many resources and species because large systems with many interacting components often display new emergent behaviors that cannot be understood or deduced from analyzing smaller systems. To address this shortcoming, we develop a sophisticated statistical physics inspired cavity method to analyze MCRM when both the number of species and the number of resources is large. We find that in this limit, species generically and consistently perturb their environments and significantly modify available ecological niches. We show how our cavity approach naturally generalizes niche theory to large ecosystems by accounting for the effect of this emergent environmental engineering on species invasion and ecological stability. Our work suggests that environmental engineering is a generic feature of large, natural ecosystems and must be taken into account when analyzing and interpreting community structure. It also highlights the important role that statistical-physics inspired approaches can play in furthering our understanding of ecology.