title: Collective Phase in Resource Competition in a Highly Diverse Ecosystem.
abstract: Organisms shape their own environment, which in turn affects their survival. This feedback becomes especially important for communities containing a large number of species; however, few existing approaches allow studying this regime, except in simulations. Here, we use methods of statistical physics to analytically solve a classic ecological model of resource competition introduced by MacArthur in 1969. We show that the nonintuitive phenomenology of highly diverse ecosystems includes a phase where the environment constructed by the community becomes fully decoupled from the outside world.
authors.affiliation: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
authors.forename: Mikhail
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tikhonov
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l'École Normale Supérieure-UMR 8549, CNRS and PSL Research, Sorbonne Université UPMC, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Remi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Monasson
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010825:Physics; D011157:Population Dynamics