Emergent competition shapes the ecological properties of multi-trophic ecosystems
Zhijie Feng, Robert Marsland III, Jason W. Rocks, and Pankaj Mehta

TL;DR
This paper develops a theoretical model to understand how intra-trophic diversity and feedbacks create emergent competition, influencing ecosystem control regimes across multiple trophic levels, aligning with empirical data.
Contribution
It introduces a generalized consumer resource model analyzing emergent competition and trophic control regimes using the zero-temperature cavity method.
Findings
Emergent competition arises from intra-trophic diversity and feedbacks.
A crossover from top-down to bottom-up control is identified.
Theoretical results align with empirical observations.
Abstract
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic structure, diversity, and competition shapes the properties of ecosystems. To address this problem, we analyze a generalized Consumer Resource Model with three trophic levels using the zero-temperature cavity method and numerical simulations. We find that intra-trophic diversity gives rise to ``emergent competition'' between species within a trophic level due to feedbacks mediated by other trophic levels. This emergent competition gives rise to a crossover from a regime of top-down control (populations are limited by predators) to a regime of bottom-up control (populations are limited by primary producers) and is captured by a simple order parameter related…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models · Evolution and Genetic Dynamics · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
