Environmental fluctuations explain the universal decay of species-abundance correlations with phylogenetic distance

Abstract

Multiple ecological forces act together to shape the composition of microbial communities. Phyloecology approaches—which combine phylogenetic relationships between species with community ecology—have the potential to disentangle such forces but are often hard to connect with quantitative predictions from theoretical models. On the other hand, macroecology, which focuses on statistical patterns of abundance and diversity, provides natural connections with theoretical models but often neglects interspecific correlations and interactions. Here, we propose a unified framework combining both such approaches to analyze microbial communities. In particular, by using both cross-sectional and longitudinal metagenomic data for species abundances, we reveal the existence of an empirical macroecological law establishing that correlations in species-abundance fluctuations across communities decay from positive to null values as a function of phylogenetic dissimilarity in a consistent manner across ecologically distinct microbiomes. We formulate three variants of a mechanistic model—each relying on alternative ecological forces—that lead to radically different predictions. From these analyses, we conclude that the empirically observed macroecological pattern can be quantitatively explained as a result of shared population-independent fluctuating resources, i.e., environmental filtering and not as a consequence of, e.g., species competition. Finally, we show that the macroecological law is also valid for temporal data of a single community and that the properties of delayed temporal correlations can be reproduced as well by the model with environmental filtering.