Grilli, whose work focuses on understanding complex phenomena by using simple rules, knew that to begin to answer that question, he needed to focus on ecological communities from many different environments, and for which a wealth of data already existed. It’s far easier to study a glass of ocean water or a spoonful of soil than a patch of forest, he explains. "Ecology is traditionally a data-poor discipline. But in the case of microbial communities, it’s much easier to get a lot of data on these communities, across several conditions,” Grilli says. "Microbial communities are everywhere. They are all around us, outside and inside us. So they contribute to many fundamental ecological processes around the world, and they determine in some part our health and well-being. Their impact on our lives and on our planet is immense.”
In parsing the abundance and diversity of bacteria in a variety of tiny worlds using a simple mathematical model, Grilli’s research suggests that environmental variability is the main determinant of whether a species is present or absent in a microbial community, and that environmental change — such as a change in temperature or nutrients — is the primary driver of fluctuations in the abundance of a species. "That sort of suggests the players are different — the species that are in our gut versus the species that are in the ocean are different — but the forces that shape them are the same,” Grilli says.
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