An ecological landscape framework for community optimization.

We consider the problem of assembling an ecological community from a pool of S candidate species that is optimal at performing a desired function. The candidate species in the pool are indexed from 1 to S. A test community is seeded with a subset of the candidate species. The composition of the community is encoded in using 0 for absence and 1 for presence for each of the species. The test communities are allowed to grow until they reach a steady state. The species abundances in the steady-state community is , and the community function is . The growth of the community to steady-state is simulated by consumer-resource models, illustrated on the right. The growth rate depends on its ability to consume resources and death occurs by dilution or mortality. In models with leakage (gray), metabolic byproducts can be leaked and used by other species. Equations shown correspond to the scenario without metabolic leakage; see methods for further explanation and model equations with leakage.