Dispersal diversity buffers species vulnerability to local extinction.

Greater heterogeneity in dispersal strategies lowers a focal species’ vulnerability to competitive exclusion at a given abundance, as quantified by competitive balance in forest communities.

• Why it matters: Predicting persistence in ecological communities is hard because mechanistic models require hard-to-estimate parameters, while statistical approaches can be less interpretable.
• What they did: The authors build a framework from statistical physics that defines competitive balance and infers it from spatial abundance data without estimating species traits or dispersal parameters.
• The result: Using tropical and temperate forest data, they validate the approach and show dispersal diversity buffers competitive-exclusion vulnerability, enabling context-dependent risk assessment across ecosystems.

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