Integrating ecological feedbacks across scales and levels of organization

2023 · doi:10.32942/x27s47
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This review explores how ecological feedbacks, operating across multiple scales and levels of organization, generate similar macroscopic system properties like coexistence and stability.

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⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-15 · read from full text ⓘ

This paper is a conceptual review examining how ecological feedback loops arise and vary across spatial and temporal scales and across levels of biological organization, from organism–environment interactions to demographic, behavioral, and landscape-level spatial feedbacks. It synthesizes how abiotic and biotic modulators can change the sign and strength of feedbacks and how different feedbacks can interact in space or time, producing emergent macroscopic properties such as species coexistence, spatial heterogeneity, and ecosystem stability. A key limitation is that it is a review rather than a new empirical study, so it does not provide new quantitative data or test specific mechanisms experimentally. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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Abstract

In ecosystems, species interact in various ways with other species, and with their local environment. In addition, ecosystems are coupled in space by diverse types of flows. From these links connecting different ecological entities can emerge circular pathways of indirect effects: feedback loops. This contributes to creating a nested set of ecological feedbacks operating at different organizational levels as well as spatial and temporal scales in ecological systems: species modifying and being affected by their local abiotic environment, demographic and behavioral feedbacks within populations and communities, and spatial feedbacks occurring at the landscape scale. Here, we review how ecological feedbacks vary in space and time, and discuss the emergent properties they generate such as species coexistence or the spatial heterogeneity and stability of ecological systems. With the aim of identifying similarities across scales, we identify the abiotic and biotic modulators that can change the sign and strength of feedback loops and show that these feedbacks can interact in space or time. Our review shows that despite acting at different scales and emerging from different processes, feedbacks generate similar macroscopic properties of ecological systems across levels of organization. Ultimately, our contribution emphasizes the need to integrate such feedbacks to improve our understanding of their joint effects on the dynamics, patterns, and stability of ecological systems.
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Abstract

In ecosystems, species interact in various ways with other species, and with their local environment. In addition, ecosystems are coupled in space by diverse types of flows. From these links connecting different ecological entities can emerge circular pathways of indirect effects: feedback loops. This contributes to creating a nested set of ecological feedbacks operating at different organizational levels as well as spatial and temporal scales in ecological systems: organisms modifying and being affected by their local abiotic environment, demographic and behavioral feedbacks within populations and communities, and spatial feedbacks occurring at the landscape scale. Here, we review how ecological feedbacks vary in space and time, and discuss the emergent properties they generate such as species coexistence or the spatial heterogeneity and stability of ecological systems. With the aim of identifying similarities across scales, we identify the abiotic and biotic modulators that can change the sign and strength of feedback loops and show that these feedbacks can interact in space or time. Our review shows that despite acting at different scales and emerging from different processes, feedbacks generate similar macroscopic properties of ecological systems across levels of organization. Ultimately, our contribution emphasizes the need to integrate such feedbacks to improve our understanding of their joint effects on the dynamics, patterns, and stability of ecological systems. DOI https://doi.org/10.32942/X27S47 Subjects Life Sciences

Keywords

niche construction, feedback loops, Ecosystem functioning, Stability, temporal and spatial scales, level of organization, species coexistence, ecosystem patterns, self-organization, emergent properties Dates Published: 2023-10-19 21:06 Last Updated: 2024-01-10 08:47 Older Versions License CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Additional Metadata Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Not applicable Language: English Metrics Views: 863 Downloads: 745

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