Environmental change can alter species’ abundances within communities consistently; for example, increasing all abundances by the same percentage, or more idiosyncratically. Here, we show how comparing effects of temperature on species grown in isolation and when grown together helps our understanding of how ecological communities more generally respond to environmental change. In particular, we find that the shape of the feasibility domain (the parameter space of carrying capacities compatible with positive species’ abundances) helps to explain the composition of experimental microbial communities under changing environmental conditions. First, we introduce a measure to quantify the asymmetry of a community’s feasibility domain using the column vectors of the corresponding interaction matrix. These column vectors describe the effects each species has on all other species in the community (hereafter referred to as species’ multidimensional effects). We show that as the asymmetry of the feasibility domain increases the relationship between species’ abundance when grown together and when grown in isolation weakens. We then show that microbial communities experiencing different temperature environments exhibit patterns consistent with this theory. Specifically, communities at warmer temperatures show relatively more asymmetry; thus, the idiosyncrasy of responses is higher compared with that in communities at cooler temperatures. These results suggest that while species’ interactions are typically defined at the pairwise level, multispecies dynamics can be better understood by focusing on the effects of these interactions at the community level.

环境变化可以持续改变社区内物种的丰富度；例如，将所有丰度增加相同的百分比，或者更特异地增加。在这里，我们展示了如何比较温度对孤立生长和一起生长的物种的影响，有助于我们了解生态群落对环境变化的总体反应。特别是，我们发现可行性域的形状（承载能力的参数空间与阳性物种的丰度相适应）有助于解释环境条件变化时实验性微生物群落的组成。首先，我们介绍一种使用相应交互矩阵的列向量来量化社区可行性域不对称性的措施。这些列向量描述了每个物种对社区中所有其他物种的影响（以下称为物种的多维影响）。我们表明，随着可行性域的不对称性增加，当物种在一起生长和孤立生长时，物种丰度之间的关系会减弱。然后，我们表明经历不同温度环境的微生物群落表现出与该理论一致的模式。具体来说，温度较高的社区表现出相对更多的不对称性。因此，与温度较低的社区相比，响应的特质性更高。这些结果表明，虽然物种的相互作用通常在成对水平上定义，