Related papers: No complexity-stability relationship in natural co…

An important challenge in theoretical ecology is to find good, coarse-grained representations of complex food webs. Here we use the approach of generalized modeling to show that it may be possible to formulate a coarse-graining algorithm…

The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive…

Ecological networks exhibit non-random structural patterns, such as modularity and nestedness, which indicate ecosystem stability, species diversity, and connectance. Such structure-stability relationships are well known. However, another…

Many real-world complex systems such as social, biological, information as well as technological systems results of a decentralized and unplanned evolution which leads to a common structuration. Irrespective of their origin, these so-called…

In food webs, many interacting species coexist despite the restrictions imposed by the competitive exclusion principle and apparent competition. For the generalized Lotka-Volterra equations, sustainable coexistence necessitates nonzero…

We develop a novel approach to study the global behaviour of large foodwebs for ecosystems where several species share multiple resources. The model extends and generalize some previous works and takes into account self-limitation. Under…

How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…

We report the results of carrying out a large number of simulations on a coevolutionary model of multispecies communities. A wide range of parameter values were investigated which allowed a rather complete picture of the change in behaviour…

Food webs are networks describing who is eating whom in an ecological community. By now it is clear that many aspects of food-web structure are reproducible across diverse habitats, yet little is known about the driving force behind this…

Mutualistic networks have attracted increasing attention in the ecological literature in the last decades as they play a key role in the maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we develop an analytical framework to study the structural stability…

Food webs -- networks of predators and prey -- have long been known to exhibit "intervality": species can generally be ordered along a single axis in such a way that the prey of any given predator tend to lie on unbroken compact intervals.…

Food webs, networks of feeding relationships among organisms, provide fundamental insights into mechanisms that determine ecosystem stability and persistence. Despite long-standing interest in the compartmental structure of food webs, past…

One of the central themes in modern ecology is the enduring debate on whether there is a relationship between the complexity of a biological community and its stability. In this paper, we focus on the role of detritus and spatial dispersion…

Many natural, complex systems are remarkably stable thanks to an absence of feedback acting on their elements. When described as networks, these exhibit few or no cycles, and associated matrices have small leading eigenvalues. It has been…

We present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called Chemical Organization Theory (COT) sheds new light on the longstanding complexity-stability debate. Namely, COT…

Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…

The analysis of some species-rich, well-defined food webs shows that they display the so called Small World behavior shared by a number of disparate complex systems. The three systems analysed (Ythan estuary web, Silwood web and the Little…

What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…

Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…

There has been a long-standing and at times fractious debate whether complex and large systems can be stable. In ecology, the so-called `diversity-stability debate' arose because mathematical analyses of ecosystem stability were either…