Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA and Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Phys Rev E. 2017 Sep;96(3-1):032410. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.96.032410. Epub 2017 Sep 18.
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing question whether this perspective is appropriate for the microbial world. Here an alternative formalism is proposed that does not require postulating the existence of species as fundamental ecological variables and provides a naturally hierarchical description of community dynamics. This formalism allows approaching the species problem from the opposite direction. While the classical models treat a world of imperfectly clustered organism types as a perturbation around well-clustered species, the presented approach allows gradually adding structure to a fully disordered background. The relevance of this theoretical construct for describing highly diverse natural ecosystems is discussed.
生态系统通常被概念化为相互作用的物种网络。然而，将生物体的自然多样性划分为离散的单元是一个众所周知的问题，越来越多的实验证据提出了一个有趣的问题，即这种观点是否适用于微生物世界。在这里，提出了一种替代的形式主义，它不需要假设物种作为基本生态变量的存在，并为群落动态提供了一种自然的层次描述。这种形式主义允许从相反的方向来处理物种问题。虽然经典模型将一个不完全聚类的生物体类型的世界视为围绕良好聚类的物种的扰动，但所提出的方法允许逐渐向完全无序的背景中添加结构。讨论了这个理论结构对于描述高度多样化的自然生态系统的相关性。
