A universal niche geometry governs the response of ecosystems to environmental perturbations.

ABSTRACT: How ecosystems respond to environmental perturbations is a fundamental question in ecology, made especially challenging due to the strong coupling between species and their environment. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework for calculating the steady-state response of ecosystems to environmental perturbations in generalized consumer-resource. Our construction is applicable to a wide class of systems, including models with non-reciprocal interactions, cross-feeding, and non-linear growth/consumption rates. Within our framework, all ecological variables are embedded into four distinct vector spaces and ecological interactions are represented by geometric transformations between these spaces. We show that near a steady state, such geometric transformations directly map environmental pert

SUBMITTER: Goyal A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11601791 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature