Related papers: Trophic coherence determines food-web stability
The stability of ecosystems as well as the relation between topology and dynamics on multilayer networks are important questions that are usually discussed in separate communities. Here, we combine these two topics by investigating the…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of an ecosystem and its biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological communities to recover after a small perturbation of the…
Although classical economic theory is based on the concept of stable equilibrium, real economic systems appear to be always out of equilibrium. Indeed, they share many of the dynamical features of other complex systems, e.g., ecological…
Unstoppable feedback loops and tipping points in socio-ecological systems are the main threats to sustainability. These behaviors have been extensively studied, notably to predict, and arguably deviate, dead-end trajectories. Behind the…
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…
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…
The stable functionality of networked systems is a hallmark of their natural ability to coordinate between their multiple interacting components. Yet, strikingly, real-world networks seem random and highly irregular, apparently lacking any…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
Just as a herd of animals relies on its robust social structure to survive in the wild, similarly robustness is a crucial characteristic for the survival of a complex network under attack. The capacity to measure robustness in complex…
Randomly-assembled dynamical systems are theoretically predicted to be unstable upon crossing a critical threshold of complexity, as first shown by May. Yet, empirical complex systems exhibit remarkable stability, indicating the presence of…
The relationship between network topology and system dynamics has significant implications for unifying our understanding of the interplay among metabolic, gene-regulatory, and ecosystem network architecures. Here we analyze the stability…
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…
Few of food web theory hypotheses/predictions can be readily tested using empirical data. An exception is represented by simple probabilistic models for food web structure, for which the likelihood has been derived. Here I test the…
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…
Coherence evolution of two food web models can be obtained under the stirring effect of chaotic advection. Each food web model sustains a three--level trophic system composed of interacting predators, consumers and vegetation. These…
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…
It is a challenge to predict the response of a large, complex system to a perturbation. Recent attempts to predict the behaviour of food webs have revealed that the effort needed to understand a system grows quickly with its complexity,…
We investigate in detail the model of a trophic web proposed by Amaral and Meyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 652 (1999)]. We focused on small-size systems that are relevant for real biological food webs and for which the fluctuations are playing…
In his seminal work in the 1970s, Robert May suggested that there is an upper limit to the number of species that can be sustained in stable equilibrium by an ecosystem. This deduction was at odds with both intuition and the observed…