The winner of the 2025 ASN Presidential Award, chosen by the ASN President from among all of the papers published in The American Naturalist in 2024. The winner of the award for 2025 is “Multitrophic Higher-Order Interactions Modulate Species Persistence” by Lisa Buche, Ignasi Bartomeus, and Oscar Godoy. Congratulations!
Ecologists have long been aware that the interaction strength between any two species is contingent on the environment. In particular, the presence of a third species can modify the interaction between any two other species. Buche and colleagues conducted a remarkable intensive experiment estimating the effect of a large number of pairwise and higher-order interactions in a simple plant-pollinator community. They estimated numerous pairwise interaction strengths, both between plants, between plants and their pollinators, and between pollinators. And, they estimated how other species modified those pairwise interactions. This is an unusually exhaustive evaluation of interaction modification, which revealed many higher-order ecological effects. The authors do an excellent job of using sophisticated statistical analyses to estimate the effects, and mathematical modeling to project the longer-term consequences of the higher order interactions on species coexistence over longer time scales. The mix of experimental work and modeling is admirable, and the study gets at a fundamental challenge in complex ecological communities.