Related papers: Trophic coherence determines food-web stability
We performed a stability analysis of 119 quantitative food webs which were compiled using a standard methodology to build Ecopath mass-balance models. Our analysis reveals that classic descriptors of complexity do not affect stability in…
Food webs have been found to exhibit remarkable motif profiles, patterns in the relative prevalences of all possible three-species sub-graphs, and this has been related to ecosystem properties such as stability and robustness. Analysing 46…
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…
We analyze the properties of seven community food webs from a variety of environments--including freshwater, marine-freshwater interfaces and terrestrial environments. We uncover quantitative unifying patterns that describe the properties…
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…
A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…
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 web topology and energy flow rates across food web linkages can influence ecosystem properties such as stability. Stability predictions from current models of energy flow are often sensitive to details in their formulation, and their…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
We investigate global stability and dynamics of large ecological networks by classical methods of the dynamical system theory, including Hamiltonian methods, and averaging. Our analysis exploits the network topological structure, namely,…
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…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
Trophic coherence, a measure of the extent to which the nodes of a directed network are organised in levels, has recently been shown to be closely related to many structural and dynamical aspects of complex systems, including graph…
The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…
Metacommunity theory is considered a promising approach for explaining species diversity and food web complexity. Recently Pillai et al. proposed a simple modeling framework for the dynamics of food webs at the metacommunity level. Here, we…
Forty years ago, Robert May questioned a central belief in ecology by proving that sufficiently large or complex ecological networks have probability of persisting close to zero. To prove this point, he analyzed large networks in which…
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…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
Mays celebrated theoretical work of the 70s contradicted the established paradigm by demonstrating that complexity leads to instability in biological systems. Here Mays random-matrix modelling approach is generalized to realistic…
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…