Multispecies

Multispecies term describes systems that involve more than one species interacting within a shared environment. In ecology and related disciplines, multispecies communities include plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and protists that influence each other's abundance, distribution, and function. The concept contrasts with monospecific or single-species studies and highlights interspecific interactions as drivers of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Interactions span trophic and non-trophic relationships: competition for resources, predation and herbivory, parasitism, mutualism, commensalism, and facilitation. The network of interactions forms complex webs that can stabilize or destabilize communities, affecting resilience to disturbances such as drought, disease, or climate change.

Research methods include field observations, controlled experiments, and computational network analyses. Multispecies co-occurrence and interaction networks, joint species distribution models, and meta-analyses integrate data across species and scales. Advances in genomics and microbiome research have expanded multispecies perspectives to include microbial consortia and host-associated communities.

Applications: conservation planning considers multispecies needs to preserve ecosystem function; agriculture and aquaculture use polycultures and integrated pest management to leverage beneficial interspecific interactions; restoration projects aim to reconstruct multispecies assemblages for resilience. Examples include tropical forests with diverse tree communities, coral reef ecosystems with coral, fish, crustaceans, and algae, and gut or soil microbial ecosystems.

Challenges include high data requirements, context dependence of interactions, and difficulty inferring causality in complex networks. Ongoing work seeks to develop standardized methods, improve cross-system comparisons, and translate multispecies knowledge into policy and management.