Environment-Organism Feedbacks Drive Changes in Ecological Interactions.

ABSTRACT: Ecological interactions are foundational to our understanding of community composition and function. While interactions are known to change depending on the environmental context, it has generally been assumed that external environmental factors are responsible for driving these dependencies. Here, we derive a theoretical framework which instead focuses on how intrinsic environmental changes caused by the organisms themselves alter interaction values. Our central concept is the 'instantaneous interaction', which captures the feedback between the current environmental state and organismal growth, generating spatiotemporal context-dependencies as organisms modify their environment over time and/or space. We use small microbial communities to illustrate how this framework can predict time-dep

SUBMITTER: Meacock OJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11687356 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature