AbstractA central theme in ecological research is to understand how species interactions contribute to community dynamics. Indeed, species interactions are the basis of parametric (model-driven) and nonparametric (model-free) approaches in theoretical and empirical work. However, despite their different interpretation across these approaches, these measures have occasionally been used interchangeably, limiting our opportunity to use their differences to gain new insights about ecological

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... . Here, we revisit two of the most used measures across these approaches: species interactions measured as constant direct effects (typically used in parametric approaches) and local aggregated effects (typically used in nonparametric approaches). We study these measures of species interactions under three categories: intra-specific, interspecific, and higher-order interactions. We show that these measures can be linked if and only if all species interactions are pairwise, demonstrate fundamental differences between inter and intra-specific interactions, and illustrate how and when these measures can be combined to gain further insights about non-equilibrium ecological dynamics and higher-order interactions.