Emergent Statistical Convergence in Microbial Communities

by Dr Luca Allegri (DFA)

Wednesday 4 Feb 2026, 17:00 → 17:15 Europe/Rome

1/2-2 - Aula C (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia - Edificio Marzolo)

Microbial communities display robust statistical regularities across ecosystems, including recurring abundance distributions and scaling relations. In this work, I analyze multiple large microbial datasets spanning distinct biological and environmental contexts and show that they exhibit remarkably similar statistical patterns despite their underlying differences. This raises a central question: are these regularities emergent properties of ecological dynamics, or do they arise from generic statistical convergence mechanisms?