Competition for fluctuating resources reproduces statistics of species abundance over time across wide-ranging microbiotas.

ABSTRACT: Across diverse microbiotas, species abundances vary in time with distinctive statistical behaviors that appear to generalize across hosts, but the origins and implications of these patterns remain unclear. Here, we show that many of these macroecological patterns can be quantitatively recapitulated by a simple class of consumer-resource models, in which the metabolic capabilities of different species are randomly drawn from a common statistical distribution. Our model parametrizes the consumer-resource properties of a community using only a small number of global parameters, including the total number of resources, typical resource fluctuations over time, and the average overlap in resource-consumption profiles across species. We show that variation in these macroscopic parameters strongly

SUBMITTER: Ho PY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9000955 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature