BEFORE THE DISTURBANCE: FUNCTIONAL INTERACTION REDUNDANCY AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITY RECOVERY The DMRE vs PRAT Named Binary in Disturbance Ecology

Structured Abstract Background Disturbance ecology has invested heavily in characterising what disturbances destroy — species richness, biomass, habitat structure — and in modelling recovery as a function of disturbance magnitude and post-disturbance species pool. The dominant frameworks (intermediate disturbance hypothesis, diversity-stability theory, neutral theory) consistently find that disturbance magnitude and residual diversity explain a minority of variance in recovery trajectory, and that communities with identical post-disturbance compositions reach divergent recovery endpoints depending on their pre-disturbance histories. Gap The tradition has a complete account of what is removed by disturbance. It has no account of what property of the pre-disturbance community architecture determines how the surviving species reorganise their functional roles. The Walker Redundancy Hypothesis and the insurance hypothesis point toward functional redundancy as a relevant property, but neither formalises it as a pre-disturbance topological index analogous to a network-theoretic architectural measure, nor tests it as a predictor of recovery trajectory independent of disturbance magnitude or post-disturbance richness. Approach We introduce the PRAT framework (Pre-disturbance Redundancy Architecture Transfer), which identifies the Functional Interaction Redundancy Index (FIRI) — the ratio of functionally non-equivalent alternative interaction pathways across ecological guilds in the pre-disturbance community interaction network — as the primary determinant of post-disturbance recovery trajectory. We derive the Named Binary DMRE vs PRAT, identify three structural anomalies that DMRE cannot resolve, specify a pre-registerable CCS using BioTIME and LTER long-term datasets, confirm cross-domain structural invariance, and derive a monitoring principle for ecological management. Results PRAT resolves three anomalies: the diversity-stability paradox, the assembly history problem, and the rewilding paradox. Cross-domain structural invariance is confirmed in neuroscience (SRCT stroke and TBI), materials science, immunology, and network engineering. The CCS is testable in existing public datasets (BioTIME, GlobalWebDB, LTER) at zero additional data-collection cost using publicly available interaction network databases and graph-theoretic analysis. Implications If confirmed, PRAT restructures ecological conservation priorities from species-count-based to interaction-topology-based; reframes ecosystem management from diversity maximisation to functional interaction redundancy optimisation; and provides the first formally derived pre-disturbance predictor of community recovery trajectory testable without any additional field data collection. Weil Protocol: not required (L1 — no direct human clinical implications). Keywords: DMRE, PRAT, disturbance ecology, functional interaction redundancy, FIRI, community recovery, interaction network topology, BioTIME, LTER, diversity-stability paradox, assembly history, rewilding, ALGUILAS-AI, IGT principle, pre-disturbance architecture, ecological resilience Method ALGUILAS-AI Dialectical Engine