Ecological communities are highly diverse. They contain multiple species that differ in their traits and their interaction configurations. This has resulted in large variety of ecological fields, e.g. terrestrial plant, marine and freshwater ecology, as the underlying mechanisms differ substantially between these communities. Each ecological community has its own particularities and therefore different methods and theories address such particularities. Yet we still lack methods grounded in ecological theory that allow comparing this apparently disconnected communities. Recent advancements in coexistence theory generalize its key concepts (niche and fitness differences) to more complex communities. We show here how these advancements can help to synthesize different fields of community ecology.
Results/Conclusions
We introduce the niche and fitness differences map (N-F map). We map species onto this map by their niche and fitness differences. The location of a species in this map gives insight into its high-level processes, such as positive or negative frequency dependence, facilitation, trophic interactions and persistence. This N-F map is independent of a specific model, it can therefore be used for community models with different underlying complexities and mechanisms (e.g. Lotka-Volterra, generalized Lotka-Volterra, Tillman resource competition, Ricker model). Importantly, the N-F map applies to different communities (terrestrial plants, marine or freshwater, food-webs) and different species interactions (e.g. resource competition, plant-pollinator interactions, trophic interactions). We apply this map to communities in which population dynamics are governed by different processes, but with the same underlying community structure (here three basal species and one consumer). We show that despite the differences in the underlying dynamics of the communities, the N-F map identifies the same high-level processes for the species. The N-F map can therefore serve as a common currency between different systems. We advocate using N-F mapping to synthesize the findings in different findings.