Fig. 3: Community trajectories are influenced by the topography of the compositional landscape.

a Illustration of the compositional landscape from the perspective of a set of starting communities entering a new environment. Two attractors are shown, with circles representing the starting communities, triangles representing the final communities, shape colours indicating community classes, and arrows indicating community trajectories. b Illustration of the location (in ordination space) and trajectory of each starting class used in the experiment. Ovals indicate approximate locations of the numbered starting classes, arrows indicate trajectories with thicker arrows indicating more consistent outcomes, and pale circles indicate putative attractors. An equivalent representation with real data is provided in Supplementary Fig. 6. c For each starting community, we computed the minimum distance to the centroid of the final community classes and the mean distance to the borders. The border was defined as the closest community in the final class. We observed that starting communities that were distant from both centroids converged to Final Class 2 particularly when they were closer to the borders of both attractors. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.