  The need to harmonise apparently irreconcilable arrangements in an ecosystem
--nestedness and segregation-- has triggered so far different strategies.
Methodological refinements, or the inclusion of behavioural preferences to the
network dynamics offer a limited approach to the problem, since one remains
constrained within a 2-dimensional view of an ecosystem, i.e. a
presence-absence matrix. Here we question this partial-view paradigm, and show
that nestedness and segregation may coexist across a varied range of scenarios.
To do so, we rely on an upscaled representation of an ecological community as
an $n$-partite hypergraph, inspired by Hutchinson's high-dimensional niche
concept and the latest trends on ecological multilayer networks. This yields an
inclusive description of an ecological system, for which we develop a natural
extension of the definition of nestedness to larger dimensional spaces,
revealing how competitive exclusion may operate regardless of a highly nested
bipartite system.
