Extended Data Fig. 2: The effect of connectance, niche overlap and asymmetry on the relationship between species evenness and relative performance in isolation in 10-species communities.

Panel (A) shows a strong interaction between asymmetry and connectance, that is high asymmetry and connectance leads to the weaker negative relationship (measured as the Spearman’s rank correlation) between species evenness and the relative performance in isolation. Connectance is measured as the fraction of non-zero coefficients and modeled following Ref. ³⁴. Note that the value of asymmetry corresponds to the tuning parameter P used in the sampling of the interaction matrix (see Methods). In panel (B), we generated the interaction matrices based on a niche framework²⁷, where all interaction coefficients are negative (competitive). Here, similarly to panel (A) high asymmetry and niche overlap lead to the weakest correlation.