Compositional multistability is widely observed in multispecies ecological communities. Since differences in community composition often lead to differences in community function, understanding compositional multistability is essential to comprehend the role of biodiversity in maintaining ecosystems. In community assembly studies, it has long been recognized that the order and timing of species migration and extinction influence structure and function of communities. The study of multistability in ecology has focused on the change in dynamical stability across environmental gradients, and was developed mainly for low-dimensional systems. As a result, methodologies for studying the compositional stability of empirical multispecies communities are not well developed. Here, we show that models previously used in ecology can be analyzed from a new perspective, the energy landscape, to unveil compositional stability in observational data. To show that our method can be applicable to real-world ecological communities, we simulated assembly dynamics driven by population-level processes, and show that results were mostly robust to different simulation assumptions. Our method reliably captured the change in the overall compositional stability of multispecies communities over environmental change, and indicated a small fraction of community compositions that may be channels for transitions between stable states. When applied to murine gut microbiota, our method showed the presence of two alternative states whose relationship changes with age, and suggested mechanisms by which aging affects the compositional stability of the murine gut microbiota. Our method provides a practical tool to study the compositional stability of communities in a changing world, and will facilitate empirical studies that integrate the concept of multistability from different fields.

中文翻译：

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能源景观分析阐明了生态群落跨环境梯度的多重稳定性

在多物种生态群落中广泛观察到成分多稳定性。由于群落组成的差异往往会导致群落功能的差异，因此了解组成的多稳定性对于理解生物多样性在维持生态系统中的作用至关重要。在群落组装研究中，人们早已认识到物种迁徙和灭绝的顺序和时间会影响群落的结构和功能。生态学中的多重稳定性研究侧重于跨环境梯度的动态稳定性变化，主要是为低维系统开发的。因此，研究经验性多物种群落组成稳定性的方法还没有得到很好的发展。这里，我们表明，以前在生态学中使用的模型可以从新的角度进行分析，即能源景观，以揭示观测数据中的成分稳定性。为了表明我们的方法可以适用于现实世界的生态群落，我们模拟了由种群水平过程驱动的装配动态，并表明结果对于不同的模拟假设大多具有鲁棒性。我们的方法可靠地捕获了多物种群落整体组成稳定性随环境变化的变化，并表明一小部分群落组成可能是稳定状态之间转换的渠道。当应用于鼠肠道微生物群时，我们的方法显示存在两种替代状态，它们的关系随年龄而变化，并提出了衰老影响小鼠肠道微生物群组成稳定性的机制。我们的方法提供了一个实用工具来研究不断变化的世界中社区的组成稳定性，并将促进整合来自不同领域的多重稳定性概念的实证研究。