Summary:

- The article presents a computational framework called CIDER (Causal Inference from Directed Ecological Relationships) that can infer causal relationships between variables in ecological systems from observational data.
- CIDER combines information about the directionality of ecological interactions with statistical measures of association to identify causal links between species, environmental factors, and other variables of interest.
- The framework is demonstrated on several case studies, including analyzing the causal relationships between species in a coral reef ecosystem and identifying drivers of phytoplankton dynamics in a lake, highlighting CIDER's potential to uncover the underlying causal structure of complex ecological systems.