Emergent competition shapes top-down versus bottom-up control in multi-trophic ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels-organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic structure, diversity, and competition shapes the properties of ecosystems. To address this problem, we analyze a generalized Consumer Resource Model with three trophic levels using the zero-temperature cavity method and numerical simulations. We derive the corresponding mean-field cavity equations and show that intra-trophic diversity gives rise to an effective "emergent competition" term between species within a trophic level due to feedbacks mediated by other trophic levels. This emergent competition gives rise to a crossover from a regime of top-down control (p

SUBMITTER: Feng Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10852287 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature