Structural asymmetry in biotic interactions as a tool to understand and predict ecological persistence

Allen‐Perkins, Alfonso; García‐Callejas, David; Bartomeus, Ignasi; Godoy, Óscar

doi:10.1101/2023.01.25.525558

Cited by 4 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…To measure each species’ vulnerability to exclusion, we tested how resistant coexistence is to perturbations. Following a recently-developed approach 45,61 , we estimated the species exclusion distance, which corresponds to the minimal distance between the vector of intrinsic growth rates and the edges of the feasibility domain (vectors corresponding to either as a proxy for how strong a perturbation must be to change the coexistence outcome in each system. To calculate the distance between the vector of intrinsic growth rates and the edges of the feasibility domain, we applied the following formula 45 : …”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution in response to an abiotic stress shapes species coexistence

Fragata

Godinho

Rodrigues

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Adaptation to novel environments have been documented at the population, phenotype and genotype level. However, the ecological consequences of this process are often ignored. For example, recent evolutionary history in different environments is expected to lead to increased growth rates and competitive abilities. These traits have been identified as key ingredients underlying species coexistence, which suggests that adaptation to new environments may shape species coexistence patterns. However, this hypothesis remains untested. To tackle this issue, we performed experimental evolution of two herbivorous spider mite species (Tetranychus urticae and T. evansi) feeding on tomato plants grown under high or low cadmium concentrations. We combined phenotypic analyses with structural stability theory to show that both the cadmium environment and evolution in it changed the coexistence patterns of the two species by increasing niche differences. In fact, the presence of cadmium reduced interspecific competition and led to facilitation between the two herbivores, entailing stable coexistence independently of the previous evolutionary history. Evolution in the cadmium environment also reduced interspecific competition in the ancestral environment, producing stable coexistence. These results show that evolution in a new environment, even in absence of interspecific competitors, affects long-term species coexistence. Importantly, it highlights that biotic interactions (within or between populations) should be accounted for when describing adaptation to novel environments.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution in response to an abiotic stress shapes species coexistence

Fragata

Godinho

Rodrigues

et al. 2023

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…This difference between raw and conditional probabilities of coexistence has led to the emergence of shape metrics of feasibility domains (Grilli et al, 2017;Saavedra et al, 2017). Recently Allen-Perkins et al (2023) showed that a notion of 'domain asymmetry' can be correlated with variations of population dynamics across species in experimental plant-communities. These results are promising, but do not yet test quantitative predictions regarding the robustness of species coexistence to actual perturbations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the robustness of species coexistence to environmental perturbations

Desallais,

Loreau,

Arnoldi

2024

Preprint

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Here we examine how the way biotic interactions determine the robustness of species coexistence in the face of environmental perturbations. For Lotka-Volterra community models, given a set of biotic interactions, recent approaches have characterized, and applied, the probability of finding at set of species intrinsic features (e.g. growth rates) that will allow coexistence. Here we ask instead: if species do coexist, given their interactions, how fragile this coexistence should be? This change of framing allows us to derive the essential features of interactions that determine the robustness of coexistence, while not reducing it to a single number. As we illustrate on data from experimental plant community experiments, our results generate new ways to study species' contextual role in maintaining coexistence, and allows us to quantify the extent to which biotic and abiotic forces align (making coexistence more robust than expected), or oppose (making coexistence less robust than expected). Because it has both as central tenets, our work helps synthesize coexistence and ecological stability theories.

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“…Additionally, a critical limitation to highlight is that our theoretical framework, under the assumption of global stability, does not accommodate the complex invasion phenomenon known as “residents strike back” (Mylius and Diekmann, 2001). Nevertheless, our proposed probabilistic frameworks has already been successfully applied to understand the behavior of communities that involve a wide range of interactions, dynamics, and populations (Allen-Perkins et al, 2023, Angulo et al, 2021, Bartomeus et al, 2021, Cenci et al, 2018, Deng et al, 2021, 2022, García-Callejas et al, 2023, Luo et al, 2022, Medeiros et al, 2021, Saavedra et al, 2017a, Song et al, 2018, 2017, Song and Saavedra, 2018, Song et al, 2023, 2021b, Tabi et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the limits to invasion prediction using coexistence outcomes

Deng

Taylor²,

Levin

et al. 2023

Preprint

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The dynamics of ecological communities in nature are typically characterized by probabilistic, sequential assembly processes (i.e., adding species across time). Because of technical or practical limitations, however, the majority of theoretical and experimental studies have focused on the outcomes derived from simultaneous assembly processes (i.e., having all species included at once). Therefore, it has become central to understand the extent to which the outcomes from such simultaneous processes can be translated into analogous outcomes from sequential processes relevant for systems in nature. This translation requires a non-trivial integration of coexistence and invasion theories. Here, we provide this integration under a geometric and probabilistic Lotka-Volterra framework. We illustrate our integration by estimating and comparing the probability of analogous outcomes between these different assembly processes. We show that while survival probability in simultaneous assembly can be fairly closely translated into colonization probability in sequential assembly, the translation is less precise between community persistence and community augmentation, as well as between exclusion probability and replacement probability. These results provide a guiding framework and testable theoretical predictions regarding the translatability of probabilistic outcomes between simultaneous and sequential processes when communities are represented by Lotka-Volterra dynamics under environmental uncertainty.

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Structural asymmetry in biotic interactions as a tool to understand and predict ecological persistence

Cited by 4 publications

References 82 publications

Evolution in response to an abiotic stress shapes species coexistence

Evolution in response to an abiotic stress shapes species coexistence

On the robustness of species coexistence to environmental perturbations

On the limits to invasion prediction using coexistence outcomes

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