Diverse interactions and ecosystem engineering can stabilize community assembly.

ABSTRACT: The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact directly with each other and indirectly through environmental effects, however to our knowledge the role of these ecosystem engineers has not been considered in ecological network models. Here we explore the dynamics of ecosystem assembly, where species colonization and extinction depends on the constraints imposed by trophic, service, and engineering dependencies. We show that our assembly model reproduces many key features of ecological systems, such as the role of generalists during assembly, realistic maximum trophic levels, and increased nestedness with mutualistic interactions. We find that ecosystem engineering has large and

SUBMITTER: Yeakel JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7335095 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature