Dispersal diversity buffers species vulnerability to local extinction

Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to statistical tools whose context-specific parameters are less interpretable. Here we present a general framework, grounded in the statistical physics of complex systems, that integrates the key processes governing species survival into a single measurable quantity: the competitive balance. This metric quantifies the vulnerability of a focal species to competitive exclusion beyond what is captured by its abundance alone by incorporating the diversity of dispersal strategies and the structure of interspecific interactions within the community. Crucially, the competitive balance can be inferred from spatial abundance data, thus circumventing the need to estimate species traits or dispersal parameters. Our results reveal that greater heterogeneity in dispersal strategies reduces vulnerability to competitive exclusion for a given abundance. We validate the framework using tropical and temperate forest data and discuss how it can be applied to a range of different ecosystems, providing a systemic and interpretable tool for assessing a context-dependent species vulnerability that accounts for its interactions with the entire community.