ArticlePhysical review. E2021
Diverse communities behave like typical random ecosystems.
Article in Physical review. E, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cell competition driven by secreted ligands: Modeling liver metastasis of colorectal cancer.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Increased nutrient diversity can induce loss of microbial diversity through enhanced resource uptake.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Fluctuating Growth Rates Link Turnover and Unevenness in Species-Rich Communities.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Accuracy of the Lotka-Volterra model fails in strongly coupled microbial consumer-resource systems.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Macroecological patterns in experimental microbial communities.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Predicting the first steps of evolution in randomly assembled communities.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Metabolic complexity drives divergence in microbial communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Predicting the First Steps of Evolution in Randomly Assembled Communities.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Resource competition predicts assembly of gut bacterial communities in vitro.Nature microbiology · 2024Article
- Phase Transition to Chaos in Complex Ecosystems with Nonreciprocal Species-Resource Interactions.Physical review letters · 2024Article
- Phase transition to chaos in complex ecosystems with non-reciprocal species-resource interactions.ArXiv · 2024Article
- Emergent competition shapes top-down versus bottom-up control in multi-trophic ecosystems.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Searching for Principles of Microbial Ecology Across Levels of Biological Organization.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Spatial exclusion leads to "tug-of-war" ecological dynamics between competing species within microchannels.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Geometry of ecological coexistence and niche differentiation.Physical review. E · 2023Article
- Geometry of ecological coexistence and niche differentiation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Controlling the human microbiome.Cell systems · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In 1972, Robert May triggered a worldwide research program studying ecological communities using random matrix theory. Yet, it remains unclear if and when we can treat real communities as random ecosystems. Here, we draw on recent progress in random matrix theory and statistical physics to extend May's approach to generalized consumer-resource models. We show that in diverse ecosystems adding even modest amounts of noise to consumer preferences results in a transition to "typicality," where macroscopic ecological properties of communities are indistinguishable from those of random ecosystems, even when resource preferences have prominent designed structures. We test these ideas using numerical simulations on a wide variety of ecological models. Our work offers an explanation for the success of random consumer resource models in reproducing experimentally observed ecological patterns in microbial communities and highlights the difficulty of scaling up bottom-up approaches in synthetic ecology to diverse communities.
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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.