Metacommunity Dynamics in Consumer Resource Models

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Microbial communities are critical to sustaining a wide variety of ecosystems, including the gut microbiome. The composition and diversity of gut microbiota at different taxonomic levels have been linked to different health outcomes. Individual gut microbiota are typically colonized by a few strains of a given species, despite extensive strain level diversity in the larger metapopulation. At a theoretical level, it is not well understood how and why the difference in diversity at these different scales emerges. In this project, we study how biodiversity arises in a simple toy model of a metacommunity called a consumer resource model. We present the full migration-diversification-drift-balance equation, governing the distribution of strain frequencies in a single deme in the metapopulation. We demonstrate through analytical calculations and simulations that in the weak migration limit, strains are subject to competitive exclusion at the metapopulation level. Finally, we show that introducing environmental heterogeneity between demes can rescue coexistence at the metapopulation level.

Author	Debesai, Serena
Thesis advisor	Good, Benjamin	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7757-3347 (unverified)
Thesis advisor	Khemani, Vedika
Degree granting institution	Stanford University
Department	Department of Physics

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/wk768gh7709
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/wk768gh7709

License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation: Debesai, S. (2023). Metacommunity Dynamics in Consumer Resource Models. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/wk768gh7709. https://doi.org/10.25740/wk768gh7709.

Undergraduate Theses, Department of Physics

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