Speaker
Description
How ecological interactions can shape community assembly and maintenance is of particular interest for microbial communities, which are generically highly diverse, and where even closely related strains can have distinct ecologies. Statistical physics offers mathematical tools to deal with the complexity of diverse communities. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in the study of generalized Lotka-Volterra (gLV) models with random interactions. In these models, the effective behaviour of any focal species comes to resemble stochastic logistic growth, which has been found to reproduce empirically observed macroecological patterns in microbial timeseries data, including for gut microbiomes. In this poster, we describe a strong-interaction regime of gLV, going beyond standard technical assumptions. We focus in particular on describing the intermittent dynamics of a chaotic phase, which produces a power-law species abundance distribution reminiscent of observations in plankton communities.
