A collective phase in resource competition in a highly diverse ecosystem

Abstract

Organisms shape their own environment, which in turn affects their survival. This feedback becomes especially important for communities containing a large number of species; however, few existing approaches allow studying this regime, except in simulations. Here, we use methods of statistical physics to analytically solve a classic ecological model of resource competition introduced by MacArthur in 1969. We show that the non-intuitive phenomenology of highly diverse ecosystems includes a phase where the environment constructed by the community becomes fully decoupled from the outside world.