12 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Blai Vidiella, Ernest Fontich, Sergi Valverde, Josep Sardanyés
Transients in ecology are extremely important since they determine how equilibria are approached. The debate on the dynamic stability of ecosystems has been largely focused on equilibrium states. However, since ecosystems are constantly changing due to climate conditions or to perturbations such as the climate crisis…
Ned J H Wontner, Matthew Spencer
The super-organismal view of ecosystems has largely been superseded by the individualistic view. One consequence of the dominance of the individualistic view is that many modern ecologists treat ecosystems as nothing more than vectors of relative abundances, ignoring the potentially important idea that an understanding…
Matthew K. Lau, Benjamin Baiser, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Aaron M. Ellison
Changes in environmental conditions can lead to a rapid shift in the state of an ecosystem (“regime shift”), which subsequently returns to the previous state slowly, if ever (“hysteresis”). Studies of ecological regime shifts have been hampered by the large spatial and temporal scales over which they occur and the lack…
Jan J. Kuiper, Bob W. Kooi, Garry D. Peterson, Wolf M. Mooij
Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from a different angle. Empirical food…
Cesar O. Flores, Susanne Kortsch, Derek Tittensor, Mike Harfoot + 1 more
Food webs have been intensively studied throughout modern ecology, using empirical evidence, statistics and modelling tools to search for consistent patterns, underlying commonalities, and variations between food webs and ecosystems. However, with few exceptions, the modelling approaches have not been based on the…
C. Gaucherel, S. Fayolle, R. Savelli, O. Philippine + 2 more
Trophic interaction networks are notoriously difficult to understand and to diagnose. Such ecological networks welcome numerous feedbacks between species and populations and are not frozen at all, as soon as we observe them over a long enough term. These topological changes may be triggered by natural forcings (e.g.…
Lingzi Wang
Understanding the generation and maintenance of our ecosystem and biodiversity is of utmost importance as we are currently seeing the disturbances in the long-term formed ecological and evolutionary systems and also facing the loss of diversity across the globe. In particular, the ecological structures, the coevolution…
Marco Tulio Angulo, Yitong Liu, Dan Morris, Serguei Saavedra
Ecosystem degradation is accelerating, threatening biodiversity and human economies. Quantifying this degradation relative to a reference baseline remains a key challenge. Yet, this quantification is essential to provide the necessary resources to regenerate ecosystems. We address this challenge by studying the…
Michael H. Cortez, Swati Patel, Sebastian J. Schreiber
We develop a novel method to identify how ecological, evolutionary, and eco-evolutionary feedbacks influence system stability. Our method determines how system stability is influenced by the stabilities of a focal subsystem (i.e., the dynamics of a subset of variables of a system), its complementary subsystem, and…
Jean-François Arnoldi, Michel Loreau, Bart Haegeman
Empirical knowledge of ecosystem stability and diversity-stability relationships is mostly based on the analysis of temporal variability of population and ecosystem properties. Variability, however, often depends on external factors that act as disturbances, making it difficult to compare its value across systems and…
Swati Patel, Michael H Cortez, Sebastian J Schreiber
A fundamental challenge in ecology continues to be identifying mechanisms that stabilize community dynamics. By altering the interactions within a community, eco-evolutionary feedbacks may play a role in community stability. Indeed, recent empirical and theoretical studies demonstrate that these feedbacks can stabilize…
Pierre Quévreux, Sébastien Barot, Élisa Thébault
Nutrient cycling is fundamental to ecosystem functioning. Despite recent major advances in the understanding of complex food web dynamics, food web models have so far generally ignored nutrient cycling. However, nutrient cycling is expected to strongly impact food web stability and functioning. To make up for this gap…