Species Field Theory: Discovery of Latent Ecological Structure from Community Time Series

Xingji Cui

Species Field Theory: Discovery of Latent Ecological Structure from Community Time Series

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Xingji Cui

Abstract

Ecological abundance time series are shaped not only by interactions among species, but also by broader community-level dynamics such as hidden resources and shared ecological constraints. We introduce Species Field Theory (SFT), a field-based framework for discovering latent ecological structure from abundance time series. SFT recovered directed interactions in a six-species Lotka--Volterra system, achieving a mean signed Spearman correlation of 0.887 across five random seeds. In a Huisman resource-competition system, SFT latent states aligned with hidden resource dynamics. These results suggest that interaction recovery is a special case of broader latent ecological structure discovery.