ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
Complexity-stability trade-off in empirical microbial ecosystems.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed.
- Salinity-driven microbial adaptation of hydrocarbon-degrading communities in coastal sediments.mSphere · 2026Article
- Diversity Patterns of Domestic Herbivore Viruses in China Reveal Transmission Dynamics with Disease Management Implications.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Mathematical Modelling and Intuition in Microbiology: A Perspective.Environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Latitudinal Variation in Estuarine Archaeal Biogeography: Deterministic vs. Stochastic Assembly Processes and Network Stability Across China's Coastal Ecosystems.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- The eco-evolutionary assembly of complex communities with multiple interaction types.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Review
- Shifted microbial network characteristics govern soil NFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Cooperation destabilizes communities, but competition pays the price.Journal of biosciences · 2026Article
- Microenvironmental Gradients Drive Spatial Stratification of Saccharifying Microbial Communities and Enzyme Activity in Strong-FlavorFoods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Rhizosphere Effect Enhances Belowground Competition of Coastal InvasiveEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Mediating role of food web structure in linking diversity to multidimensional stability: Evidence from global marine ecosystems.Science advances · 2025Article
- Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy were more strongly associated with the functional and network profiles than with the community composition of the gut bacteriome: a pilot study.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2025Article
- Nest Microbial Community Dynamics Within the Nest-Building Stage of Green-Backed Tits (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Evolution of foraging behaviour induces variable complexity-stability relationships in mutualist-exploiter-predator communities.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Particle-attached bacterial communities are more susceptible to seasonal environmental fluctuations in mesotrophic than eutrophic tropical reservoirs.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2025Article
- Deciphering the Distinct Associations of Rhizospheric and Endospheric Microbiomes with Capsicum Plant Pathological Status.Microbial ecology · 2025Article
- Wetland restoration suppresses microbial carbon metabolism by altering keystone species interactions.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Biotic interactions and environmental modifications determine symbiotic microbial diversity and stability.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2024Article
- Stability of Ecological Systems: A Theoretical Review.Physics reports · 2024Article
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4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
May's stability theory, which holds that large ecosystems can be stable up to a critical level of complexity, a product of the number of resident species and the intensity of their interactions, has been a central paradigm in theoretical ecology. So far, however, empirically demonstrating this theory in real ecological systems has been a long-standing challenge with inconsistent results. Especially, it is unknown whether this theory is pertinent in the rich and complex communities of natural microbiomes, mainly due to the challenge of reliably reconstructing such large ecological interaction networks. Here we introduce a computational framework for estimating an ecosystem's complexity without relying on a priori knowledge of its underlying interaction network. By applying this method to human-associated microbial communities from different body sites and sponge-associated microbial communities from different geographical locations, we found that in both cases the communities display a pronounced trade-off between the number of species and their effective connectance. These results suggest that natural microbiomes are shaped by stability constraints, which limit their complexity.
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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.