ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Universal abundance fluctuations across microbial communities, tropical forests, and urban populations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Scaling laws for function diversity and specialization across socioeconomic and biological complex systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Macroecological Laws Can Naturally Arise from Chaotic Internal Species Dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Macroecological patterns in experimental microbial communities.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Quantifying COScience advances · 2025Article
- Life history is a key driver of temporal fluctuations in tropical tree abundances.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Growth-rate distributions of gut microbiota time series.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Asynchronous abundance fluctuations can drive giant genotype frequency fluctuations.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Asynchronous abundance fluctuations can drive giant genotype frequency fluctuations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Structured community transitions explain the switching capacity of microbial systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Sparse species interactions reproduce abundance correlation patterns in microbial communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Scale-dependent power law properties in hashtag usage time series of Weibo.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Ecological landscapes guide the assembly of optimal microbial communities.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The growth of complex populations, such as microbial communities, forests, and cities, occurs over vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Although research in different fields has developed detailed, system-specific models to understand each individual system, a unified analysis of different complex populations is lacking; such an analysis could deepen our understanding of each system and facilitate cross-pollination of tools and insights across fields. Here, we use a shared framework to analyze time-series data of the human gut microbiome, tropical forest, and urban employment. We demonstrate that a single, three-parameter model of stochastic population dynamics can reproduce the empirical distributions of population abundances and fluctuations in all three datasets. The three parameters characterizing a species measure its mean abundance, deterministic stability, and stochasticity. Our analysis reveals that, despite the vast differences in scale, all three systems occupy a similar region of parameter space when time is measured in generations. In other words, although the fluctuations observed in these systems may appear different, this difference is primarily due to the different physical timescales associated with each system. Further, we show that the distribution of temporal abundance fluctuations is described by just two parameters and derive a two-parameter functional form for abundance fluctuations to improve risk estimation and forecasting.
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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.