| Issue |
EPL
Volume 150, Number 5, June 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 51002 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| Section | Statistical physics and networks | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/addae2 | |
| Published online | 16 June 2025 | |
Unveiling complexity: Statistical physics approaches to ecological communities
1 Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes (MSC), Université Paris Cité, CNRS - 75013 Paris, France
2 Institut de Biologie de l'ENS, Département de Biologie, École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, INSERM Université Paris Science & Lettres - Paris 75005, France
3 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Department of Theoretical Biology - Plön 24306, Germany
Received: 16 December 2024
Accepted: 20 May 2025
Species-rich ecosystems, notably microbial communities, display regular patterns in diversity, abundance distribution, and function, independently of their specific composition. The effort to understand how such regularities are achieved and maintained has driven the development of theoretical approaches inspired by complex systems and statistical physics. We introduce three classical frameworks for modelling biological communities —neutral models, the Generalized Lotka-Volterra equations, and a Consumer-Resource model— and discuss their hypotheses and empirical support. We further discuss a few theoretical challenges for future research, emphasizing the pivotal role of interfacing theory with ecological data.
© 2025 The author(s)
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