Meacock, O.J. orcid.org/0000-0001-6269-9855 and Mitri, S. orcid.org/0000-0003-3930-5357 (2025) Environment‐organism feedbacks drive changes in ecological interactions. Ecology Letters, 28 (1). e70027. ISSN 1461-023X
Abstract
Ecological interactions are foundational to our understanding of community composition and function. While interactions are known to change depending on the environmental context, it has generally been assumed that external environmental factors are responsible for driving these dependencies. Here, we derive a theoretical framework which instead focuses on how intrinsic environmental changes caused by the organisms themselves alter interaction values. Our central concept is the ‘instantaneous interaction’, which captures the feedback between the current environmental state and organismal growth, generating spatiotemporal context‐dependencies as organisms modify their environment over time and/or space. We use small microbial communities to illustrate how this framework can predict time‐dependencies in a toxin degradation system, and relate time‐ and spatial‐dependencies in crossfeeding communities. By re‐centring the relationship between organisms and their environment, our framework predicts the variations in interactions wherever intrinsic, organism‐driven environmental change dominates over external drivers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | antibiotic resistance; consumer-resource modelling; context-dependency; crossfeeding; ecological interactions; mathematical ecology; microbial communities; microfluidics; spatiotemporal dynamics; stress gradient hypothesis |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 15 Jan 2025 17:07 |
Last Modified: | 15 Jan 2025 17:07 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70027 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/ele.70027 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:221371 |