Topological conditions drive stability in meta-ecosystems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Nauta, Johannes, De Domenico, Manlio
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Nauta, Johannes
De Domenico, Manlio
author_facet Nauta, Johannes
De Domenico, Manlio
contents 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 communities. While observational studies indicate that increased biodiversity must, somehow, be driving stability, theoretical studies have argued the exact opposite viewpoint instead. This encouraged many researchers to participate in the ongoing diversity-stability debate. Within this context, however, there has been a severe lack of studies that consider spatial features explicitly, even though nearly all habitats are spatially embedded. To this end, we study here the linear stability of meta-ecosystems on networks that describe how discrete patches are connected by dispersal between them. By combining results from random-matrix theory and network theory, we are able to show that there are three distinct features that underlie stability: edge density, tendency to triadic closure, and isolation or fragmentation. Our results appear to further indicate that network sparsity does not necessarily reduce stability, and that connections between patches are just as, if not more, important to consider when studying the stability of large ecological systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_05390
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Topological conditions drive stability in meta-ecosystems
Nauta, Johannes
De Domenico, Manlio
Populations and Evolution
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
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 communities. While observational studies indicate that increased biodiversity must, somehow, be driving stability, theoretical studies have argued the exact opposite viewpoint instead. This encouraged many researchers to participate in the ongoing diversity-stability debate. Within this context, however, there has been a severe lack of studies that consider spatial features explicitly, even though nearly all habitats are spatially embedded. To this end, we study here the linear stability of meta-ecosystems on networks that describe how discrete patches are connected by dispersal between them. By combining results from random-matrix theory and network theory, we are able to show that there are three distinct features that underlie stability: edge density, tendency to triadic closure, and isolation or fragmentation. Our results appear to further indicate that network sparsity does not necessarily reduce stability, and that connections between patches are just as, if not more, important to consider when studying the stability of large ecological systems.
title Topological conditions drive stability in meta-ecosystems
topic Populations and Evolution
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05390