Data from: Higher-order interactions capture unexplained complexity in diverse communities

Natural communities are well known to be maintained by many complex
processes. Despite this, the practical aspects of studying them often
require some simplification, such as the widespread assumption that
direct, additive competition captures the important details about how
interactions between species impact community diversity. On the other
hand, more complex non-additive ‘higher-order’ interactions, are assumed
to be negligible or absent. Notably, these assumptions are poorly
supported and have major consequences for the accuracy with which patterns
of natural diversity are modelled and explained. We present a
mathematically simple framework for incorporating biologically meaningful
complexity into models of diversity by including non-additive higher-order
interactions. We further provide empirical evidence that such higher-order
interactions strongly influence species’ performance in natural plant
communities, with variation in seed production (as a proxy for per capita
fitness) explained dramatically better when at least some higher-order
interactions are considered. Our study lays the groundwork for a
long-overdue shift in how species interactions are used to study the
diversity of natural communities.