Macroecological Laws Can Naturally Arise from Chaotic Internal Species Dynamics

Abstract

Macroecological relationships that connect various statistical descriptors of long-term and short-term species dynamics represent some of the most general laws in ecology and biology. These macroecological laws have been observed across diverse ecologies of plants and animals, and more recently, also in microbiota. Yet it remains unclear why strikingly similar macroecological relationships often arise in very different biological communities and various environmental contexts. Here, we investigated whether chaotic internal dynamics in spatially heterogeneous communities could underlie multiple macroecological relationships. Our analyses reveal that very general constraints on species interactions and spatial migration parameters can simultaneously lead to multiple macroecological laws found in microbial ecosystems without requiring external sources of noise. Our study also identifies the mechanistic origins of many empirically observed macroecological relationships, such as Taylors law, anomalous abundance diffusion, the Laplace distribution of short-term abundance changes, and the distribution of species residence times. Overall, we demonstrate how macroecological laws can arise from interaction-driven chaotic dynamics and common ecological constraints, thereby providing a unifying explanation for their widespread prevalence in nature.