Contemporary niche theory is a powerful conceptual framework for understanding URLanisms interact with each other and with their shared environment. Here we show that a large segment of niche theory is equivalent to a Minimum Environmental Perturbation Principle (MEPP): ecosystems URLanize into a state that minimizes the  impact URLanisms on their environment. Different choices of environmental dynamics naturally give rise to distinct dissimilarity measures for quantifying environmental impact. The MEPP allows for the analysis of ecosystems with large numbers of species and environmental factors and provides a new avenue for analyzing ecological invasions. The MEPP also rigorously connects ecological bistability with the existence of multiple minima in a statistical-physics inspired landscapes. We show that the presence of environmental feedbacks  URLanisms can produce new resources in addition to depleting them  violates the global MEPP. However, even in the presence of such feedbacks, a weaker, local version of the MEPP still applies in a limited region of resource space  .
Contemporary niche theory is a powerful conceptual framework for understanding URLanisms interact with each other and with their shared environment. Here we show that , for a wide range of modeling assumptions, niche theory is equivalent to a Minimum Environmental Perturbation Principle (MEPP): ecosystems URLanize into a state that minimizes the collective impact URLanisms on their environment. Different choices of environmental dynamics naturally give rise to distinct dissimilarity measures for quantifying environmental impact. The MEPP allows for the analysis of ecosystems with large numbers of species and environmental factors and provides a new avenue for analyzing ecological invasions. We show that the presence of environmental feedbacks , URLanisms can produce new resources in addition to depleting them , violates the global MEPP. However, even in the presence of such feedbacks, a weaker, local version of the MEPP still applies in a limited region of resource space . We show that the MEPP framework is consistent with classic experiments on competition for substitutable resources in herbivorous zooplankton and propose new experiments for testing MEPP directly .
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a large segment of
, for a wide range of modeling assumptions,
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collective
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The MEPP also rigorously connects ecological bistability with the existence of multiple minima in a statistical-physics inspired landscapes.
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,
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. We show that the MEPP framework is consistent with classic experiments on competition for substitutable resources in herbivorous zooplankton and propose new experiments for testing MEPP directly