Global epistasis and the emergence of ecological function

Abstract

The emergence of community functions is the result of a complex web of interactions between organisms and their environment. This complexity poses a significant obstacle in quantitatively predicting ecological function from the species-level composition of a community. In this study, we demonstrate that the collective impact of interspecies interactions leads to the emergence of simple linear models that predict ecological function. These predictive models mirror the patterns of global epistasis reported in genetics, and they can be quantitatively interpreted in terms of pairwise ecological interactions between species. Our results illuminate an unexplored path to quantitatively linking the composition and function of ecological communities, bringing the tasks of predicting biological function at the genetic, organismal, and ecological scales under the same quantitative formalism.