ArticleEcology letters2022
Forecasting in the face of ecological complexity: Number and strength of species interactions determine forecast skill in ecological communities.
Article in Ecology letters, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Quantifying and exploring state-dependent ecological interactions from time series data using Gaussian process regression.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Mixed Evidence for Species Diversity Affecting Ecological Forecasts in Constant Versus Declining Light.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Microbial community organization designates distinct pulmonary exacerbation types and predicts treatment outcome in cystic fibrosis.Nature communications · 2024Observational
- Using neural ordinary differential equations to predict complex ecological dynamics from population density data.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Microbial community organization designates distinct pulmonary exacerbation types and predicts treatment outcome in cystic fibrosis.Research square · 2024Article
- Disruption of ecological networks in lakes by climate change and nutrient fluctuations.Nature climate change · 2023Article
- Forecasting in the face of ecological complexity: Number and strength of species interactions determine forecast skill in ecological communities.Ecology letters · 2022Article
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 potential for forecasting the dynamics of ecological systems is currently unclear, with contrasting opinions regarding its feasibility due to ecological complexity. To investigate forecast skill within and across systems, we monitored a microbial system exposed to either constant or fluctuating temperatures in a 5-month-long laboratory experiment. We tested how forecasting of species abundances depends on the number and strength of interactions and on model size (number of predictors). We also tested how greater system complexity (i.e. the fluctuating temperatures) impacted these relations. We found that the more interactions a species had, the weaker these interactions were and the better its abundance was predicted. Forecast skill increased with model size. Greater system complexity decreased forecast skill for three out of eight species. These insights into how abundance prediction depends on the connectedness of the species within the system and on overall system complexity could improve species forecasting and monitoring.
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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.