{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-minimum-environmental-perturbation","title":"The Minimum Environmental Perturbation Principle: A New Perspective on Niche Theory","arxiv_id":"1901.09673","date":"2019-12-18","proceeding":null,"authors":[],"abstract":"Fifty years ago, Robert MacArthur showed that stable equilibria optimize\nquadratic functions of the population sizes in several important ecological\nmodels. Here, we generalize this finding to a broader class of systems within\nthe framework of contemporary niche theory, and precisely state the conditions\nunder which an optimization principle (not necessarily quadratic) can be\nobtained. We show that conducting the optimization in the space of\nenvironmental states instead of population sizes leads to a universal and\ntransparent physical interpretation of the objective function. Specifically,\nthe equilibrium state minimizes the perturbation of the environment induced by\nthe presence of the competing species, subject to the constraint that no\nspecies has a positive net growth rate. We use this \"minimum environmental\nperturbation principle\" to make new predictions for eco-evolution and community\nassembly, and describe a simple experimental setting where its conditions of\nvalidity have been empirically tested.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09673v4","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.09673v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-minimum-environmental-perturbation","repo_url":"https://github.com/Emergent-Behaviors-in-Biology/mepp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}