Dual Buffering in Ecological Communities

Investigate whether ecological mechanisms or species act as dual buffers that mitigate both environmental stresses (e.g., temperature or resource fluctuations) and mutational analogs at the community level (e.g., species invasions), by acting on low-dimensional latent variables that govern community function.

Background

Dual buffering posits that mechanisms evolved to buffer environmental perturbations also buffer mutational effects because both act through the same soft modes. This duality is supported in developmental systems (e.g., Hsp90) and predicted to be general.

Extending this concept to ecology would assess whether certain species or interaction structures buffer both environmental changes and compositional perturbations via control of shared latent ecological variables, improving robustness and predictability of community function.