Assembly of large communities with structured interactions

One can find dozens of plant species in an acre of grassland, and thousands of microbial taxa in a gram of soil. In such communities, there are far too many potential species interactions to measure or model directly, which poses a core challenge for understanding how they assemble and persist. To deal with this challenge, I develop theory that treats the details of species interactions as random, while building in structure that we know shapes real communities - like trade-offs between competing life-history strategies, or correlations among traits that arise from shared evolutionary history. This approach allows me to identify and study general, predictable features of the community assembly process. My work in this area has shown that realistic network structure can promote the assembly of large, stable communities. These self-assembled communities often have interesting and surprising properties. For instance, they may contain many pairs of species that couldn't coexist on their own - a phenomenon called emergent coexistence that challenges traditional ideas about how species coexist, but mirrors patterns seen in real microbial communities.

Key publications:
Coexistence of many species under a random competition-colonization trade-off (2024) PNAS
Metabolic trade-offs can reverse the resource-diversity relationship (2024) American Naturalist
Effects of phylogeny on coexistence in model communities (2025) American Naturalist
Multispecies coexistence emerges from pairwise exclusions in communities with competitive hierarchy (2025) Ecology Letters