The Ecosystem Dynamics That Can Make or Break an Invasion
The approach has been fruitful. In 2022, Gore and colleagues discovered that ecological communities undergo phase transitions — a core organizing principle in physics that describes, for example, water’s change from solid ice to liquid to gas. As the researchers increased either the number of species in their experimental ecosystems or the strength of the interactions between species, the ecosystems might progress through three phases. In phase one, all bacterial populations remained stable. In