RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Laws of diversity and variation in microbial communities
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 680454
DO 10.1101/680454
A1 Grilli, Jacopo
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/27/680454.abstract
AB How coexistence of many species is maintained is a fundamental and unanswered question in ecology. Coexistence is a puzzle because we lack a quantitative understanding of the variation in species presence and abundance. Whether variation in ecological communities is driven by deterministic or random processes is one of the most controversial issues in ecology. Here, we study the variation of species presence and abundance in microbial communities from a macroecological standpoint. We identify three novel, fundamental, and universal macroecological laws that characterize the fluctuation of species abundance across communities and over time. These three laws — in addition to predicting the presence and absence of species, diversity and other commonly studied macroecological patterns — allow to test mechanistic models and general theories aiming at describing the fundamental processes shaping microbial community composition and dynamics. We show that a mathematical model based on environmental stochasticity quantitatively predicts the three macroecological laws, as well as non-stationary properties of community dynamics.