Ecological theorists have generated several yet unresolved disputes that try to untangle the difficulty in understanding the nature of complex ecological communities. In this paper, we combine two recent theoretical approaches that used together suggest a promising way to consider how evolutionary and ecological processes may be used to frame a general theory of community ecology and its functional stability. First, we consider the theoretical proposal by Vellend (2016) to focus on a small set of higher‐level evolutionary and ecological processes that act on species within an ecological community. These processes provide a basis for ecological theory similar to the way in which theoretical population genetics has focused on a small set of mathematical descriptions to undergird its theory. Second, we explore ideas that might be applied to ecosystem functioning developed by Moreno and Mossio's (2015) work on how biologically autonomous systems emerge from closure of relevant constraints. To explore the possibility that combining these two ideas may provide a more general theoretical understanding of ecological communities, we have developed a stochastic, agent‐based model, with agents representing species, that explores the potential of using evolutionary and ecological processes as a constraint on the flow of species through an ecosystem. We explore how these ideas help illuminate aspects of stability found in many ecological communities. These agent‐based modeling results provide in‐principle arguments that suggest that constraint closure, using evolutionary and ecological processes, explain general features of ecological communities. In particular, we find that our model suggests a perspective useful in explaining repeated patterns of stability in ecological evenness, species turnover, species richness and in measures of fitness.

中文翻译：

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约束封闭是否可以提供对生态系统中社区动态的一般理解？

生态理论家引发了数个尚未解决的争端，试图解决理解复杂生态群落本质的困难。在本文中，我们结合了两种最近使用的理论方法，它们共同提出了一种有前途的方式来考虑如何使用进化和生态过程来构建关于社区生态学及其功能稳定性的一般理论。首先，我们考虑Vellend（2016）的理论建议，重点关注作用于生态群落中物种的一小部分较高层次的进化和生态过程。这些过程为生态学理论提供了基础，类似于理论种群遗传学侧重于少量数学描述以支持其理论的方式。第二，我们探讨了莫雷诺和莫西奥（Moreno and Mossio，2015）的工作可能会应用于生态系统功能的想法，这些工作涉及如何通过封闭相关约束而出现生物自主系统。为了探索将这两种观点结合起来可能提供对生态群落更一般的理论理解的可能性，我们开发了一种随机的，基于主体的模型，其中主体代表了物种，探讨了使用进化和生态过程作为限制人类活动的潜力的可能性。物种通过生态系统的流动。我们探索这些想法如何帮助阐明许多生态社区中发现的稳定性方面。这些基于主体的建模结果提供了原理上的论据，表明使用进化和生态过程的约束封闭解释了生态群落的一般特征。