Linking biotic interactions to species stability

Abstract

Ecological communities are often composed of many species, each interacting in complex ways. This complexity makes predictions of species responses to disturbances challenging. Here, we analyze dynamical community models and reveal an unexpectedly simple principle: species stability is governed by a single metric--self-regulation loss (SL). SL quantifies the importance of self-regulatory processes in species population dynamics. In effect, SL captures a collective outcome of species interactions, organizing how individual species respond to disturbances. When applied to data from protist community experiments, SL accurately forecasts species responses to temperature changes. Our work reveals that, despite the complexity of ecological systems, species stability follows a remarkably simple organizing principle.