A new way to determine whether a species will successfully invade an ecosystem
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When a new species is introduced into an ecosystem, it may succeed in establishing itself, or it may fail to gain a foothold and die out. Physicists at MIT have now devised a formula that can predict which of those outcomes is most likely.
The researchers created their formula based on analysis of hundreds of different scenarios that they modeled using populations of soil bacteria grown in their laboratory. They now plan to test their formula in larger-scale ecosystems, including forests. This approach could also be helpful in predicting whether probiotics or fecal microbiota treatments (FMT) would successfully combat infections of the human GI tract.
