Phenocopying in Ecological Systems

Investigate whether phenocopying occurs in ecological communities by determining if environmental perturbations (e.g., temperature or nutrient changes) and compositional perturbations (e.g., addition or removal of species) drive coordinated changes in species abundances along the same low-dimensional ecological modes of covariation.

Background

The paper argues that soft modes imply phenocopying: mutational and environmental perturbations produce aligned changes along low-dimensional manifolds. While phenocopying has been documented in proteins and cellular transcriptomes, its manifestation in ecological systems has not been characterized.

Ecological communities often display low-dimensional patterns in species covariation (eco-modes). Demonstrating phenocopying in this context would show that both environmental changes and species additions move communities along the same latent ecological axes, providing a unified mechanism across biological scales.