ArticleEcology letters2019
Superorganisms or loose collections of species? A unifying theory of community patterns along environmental gradients.
Article in Ecology letters, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Biotic interactions biogeography: A framework for understanding how species interactions shape biodiversity patterns across scales.PLoS biology · 2026Review
- Modeling the emergent metabolic potential of soil microbiomes in Atacama landscapes.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Floral resource availability declines and florivory increases along an elevation gradient in a highly biodiverse community.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Modeling tumors as complex ecosystems.iScience · 2024Review
- Modeling tumors as species-rich ecological communities.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The Entropy of Entropy: Are We Talking about the Same Thing?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Assessing the importance of interspecific interactions in the evolution of microbial communities.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Contribution of genome-scale metabolic modelling to niche theory.Ecology letters · 2022Article
- Four species of bacteria deterministically assemble to form a stable biofilm in a millifluidic channel.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2021Article
- Towards an ecosystem model of infectious disease.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- Ecological recipes for selecting community function.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
- Intrinsic ecological dynamics drive biodiversity turnover in model metacommunities.Nature communications · 2021Article
- What's hot and what's not: Making sense of biodiversity 'hotspots'.Global change biology · 2021Article
- Understanding the critical rate of environmental change for ecosystems, cyanobacteria as an example.PloS one · 2021Article
- A process-based metacommunity framework linking local and regional scale community ecology.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Does evolution design robust food webs?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Understanding the evolution of interspecies interactions in microbial communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Ecotone formation through ecological niche construction: the role of biodiversity and species interactions.Ecography · 2020Article
- Article
- Telling ecological networks apart by their structure: An environment-dependent approach.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The question whether communities should be viewed as superorganisms or loose collections of individual species has been the subject of a long-standing debate in ecology. Each view implies different spatiotemporal community patterns. Along spatial environmental gradients, the organismic view predicts that species turnover is discontinuous, with sharp boundaries between communities, while the individualistic view predicts gradual changes in species composition. Using a spatially explicit multispecies competition model, we show that organismic and individualistic forms of community organisation are two limiting cases along a continuum of outcomes. A high variance of competition strength leads to the emergence of organism-like communities due to the presence of alternative stable states, while weak and uniform interactions induce gradual changes in species composition. Dispersal can play a confounding role in these patterns. Our work highlights the critical importance of considering species interactions to understand and predict the responses of species and communities to environmental changes.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.