Resource-use plasticity governs the causal relationship between traits and community structure in model microbial communities.

ABSTRACT: Resolving the relationship between species' traits and their relative abundance is a central challenge in ecology. Current hypotheses assume relative abundances either result from or are independent of traits. However, despite some success, these hypotheses do not integrate the feedback interactions between traits and abundances to predictions of community structure such as relative abundance distributions and trait-abundance relationships. Here, we study how plasticity in resource-use traits governs the causal relationship between traits and relative abundances. We adopt a consumer-resource model that incorporates resource-use plasticity that operates to optimize organism growth, underpinned by investment constraints in physiological machinery for the acquisition of resources. We first sh

SUBMITTER: McGuinness B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12304891 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature