Beyond simple inhabitants: detecting ecosystem engineering with causal modelling

Join ESIIL's BioViewPoint working group for their EDS Seminar on June 2nd at 11 am MT! This talk is part of ESIIL's Working Group Showcase taking place on Tuesdays from 11-11:50 am from May 19 to June 30, 2026 where ESIIL's first cohort of working groups will share the story and legacy of their working groups.

Abstract:

Organisms do not simply respond to their environments — they actively shape them. The concept of ecosystem engineering was initially defined narrowly, describing species that drive geomorphic change in their surroundings. More recent expansions of the definition — encompassing organisms that directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to other species through physical changes to biotic or abiotic materials — recognise that all organisms participate in dynamic, reciprocal relationships with the ecosystems in which they live, making ecosystem engineering a pervasive feature of ecological systems. At the same time, advances in remote sensing, long-term biodiversity monitoring, and statistical modelling now offer new opportunities to detect and quantify these relationships in real-world settings.

We present an integrative framework for detecting and characterising these dynamics across three axes: the relationship between an engineer species and its environment, between the engineer and other populations in the community, and among those other populations as mediated by the engineered environment. The framework combines long-term biodiversity surveys, remotely sensed environmental data, and empirical dynamic modelling — a causal discovery approach suited to the nonlinear, dynamic nature of ecological systems — to determine whether, and to what degree, populations engineer particular aspects of their environments.

We apply the framework to empirical case studies spanning contrasting ecosystems. In a tropical marine system, we ask whether coral populations causally drive chlorophyll-a concentration — a key indicator of water quality and nutrient dynamics. In a boreal system, we examine whether three conifer species — spruce, birch, and pine — engineer local soil moisture conditions, and how these species interact with one another in doing so. Together, these case studies demonstrate how integrating satellite-derived environmental proxies with longitudinal biological monitoring can reveal the degree to which organisms are architects, not just inhabitants, of their ecosystems.

Speaker Bio:

Kimberly L. Thompson is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. As a quantitative ecologist, her research pursues questions that merge macrosystems biology and community ecology to understand biodiversity change in response to anthropogenic stressors.