Reconstructing community dynamics from limited observations
DE VOS, Willem
Nanyang Technological University [Singapour] [NTU]
Organismal and Evolutionary Biology [Helsinki]
Nanyang Technological University [Singapour] [NTU]
Organismal and Evolutionary Biology [Helsinki]
SOMMERIA-KLEIN, Guilhem
University of Turku
Pleiade, from patterns to models in computational biodiversity and biotechnology [PLEIADE]
< Reduce
University of Turku
Pleiade, from patterns to models in computational biodiversity and biotechnology [PLEIADE]
Language
en
Document de travail - Pré-publication
This item was published in
2025
English Abstract
Ecosystems tend to fluctuate around stable equilibria in response to internal dynamics and environmental factors. Occasionally, they enter an unstable tipping region and collapse into an alternative stable state. Our ...Read more >
Ecosystems tend to fluctuate around stable equilibria in response to internal dynamics and environmental factors. Occasionally, they enter an unstable tipping region and collapse into an alternative stable state. Our understanding of how ecological communities vary over time and respond to perturbations depends on our ability to quantify and predict these dynamics. However, the scarcity of long, dense time series data poses a severe bottleneck for characterising community dynamics using existing methods. We overcome this limitation by combining information across multiple short time series using Bayesian inference. By decomposing dynamics into deterministic and stochastic components using Gaussian process priors, we predict stable and tipping regions along the community landscape and quantify resilience while addressing uncertainty. After validation with simulated and real ecological time series, we use the model to question common assumptions underlying classical potential analysis and re-evaluate the stability of previously proposed "tipping elements" in the human gut microbiota.Read less <
English Keywords
Bistability
exit time
Gaussian processes
human gut microbiota
microbial ecology
stability landscape
stochastic differential equation
tipping points
Origin
Hal imported