Statistical physics of species-rich communities
Dr. Emil Mallmin, Postdoc, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Germany
Ecological communities sit between single populations and whole ecosystems on the ladder of biological complexity. To what extent general principles can be found among the idiosyncrasies that make each community unique has remained a fundamental question at the heart of community ecology. For species-rich communities at a single tropic level - e.g., tropical trees, or phytoplankton assemblages - a statistical physics is emerging in recent years, leveraging the high-dimensional and disordered nature of such communities to explain common biodiversity patterns. In this talk I will demonstrate how a minimal model of competing species affected by environmental noise, dispersal, and self-limitation contain the essential ingredients for explaining several stylized facts of empirical communities: compositional turnover, persistent diversity, and the commonness of rarity.