Data from: Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities

Invasions of microbial communities by species such as pathogens can have
significant impacts on ecosystem services and human health1–9. Predicting
the outcomes of these invasions, however, remains a challenge. Various
theories propose that these outcomes depend on either characteristics of
the invading species10–12 or attributes of the resident community13–16,
including its composition and biodiversity3,17–19. Here we used a
combination of experiments and theory to show that the interplay between
dynamics, interaction strength, and diversity determine the invasion
outcome in microbial communities. We found that the communities with
fluctuations in species abundance are both more invasible and more diverse
than stable communities, leading to a positive diversity-invasibility
relationship among communities assembled in the same environment. As
predicted by theory, increasing interspecies interaction strength and
species pool size leads to a decrease of invasion probability in our
experiment. Although diversity-invasibility relationships are
qualitatively different depending upon how the diversity is changed, we
provide a unified perspective on the diversity-invasibility debate by
showing a universal positive correspondence between invasibility and
survival fraction of resident species across all conditions. Communities
composed of strongly interacting species can exhibit an emergent priority
effect in which invader species are less likely to colonize than species
in the original pool. However, in this regime of strong interspecies
interactions, if an invasion is successful, it causes larger ecological
effects on the resident community than when interactions are weak. Our
results demonstrate that the invasibility and invasion effect are emergent
properties of interacting species, which can be predicted by simple
community-level features.