25 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Yizhou Liu, Jiliang Hu, Jeff Gore
The stability of ecological communities has a profound impact on humans, ranging from individual health influenced by the microbiome to ecosystem services provided by fisheries. A long-standing goal of ecology is the elucidation of the interplay between biodiversity and ecosystem stability, with some ecologists warning…
Susanne Pettersson, Van M. Savage, Martin Nilsson Jacobi
Dynamical shifts between the extremes of stability and collapse are hallmarks of ecological systems. These shifts are limited by and change with biodiversity, complexity, and the topology and hierarchy of interactions. Most ecological research has focused on identifying conditions for a system to shift from stability…
Da Lü, Yihe Lü, Guangyao Gao, Siqi Sun + 2 more
Ecological stability is a critical factor in global sustainable development, yet its significance has been overlooked. Here we introduce a landscape-oriented framework to evaluate ecological stability in the Qingzang Plateau (QP). Our findings reveal a medium-high stability level in the QP, with minimal changes over…
Gidon Eshel, Yohay Carmel, Boris Podobnik
Analysis of stability under linearized dynamics is central to ecology. We highlight two key limitations of the widely used traditional analysis. First, we note that while stability at fixed points is often the focus, ecological systems may spend less time near fixed points, and more time responding to stochastic…
Charlotte Kunze, Dominik Bahlburg, Maren Striebel, Toni Schott + 2 more
Understanding the relationship between biodiversity and both the functioning and stability of ecosystems has been a central focus of ecologists for decades. A step-change in our understanding of the biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationship was enabled by explicit measurement of the additional functioning…
Qingqing Chen, Shaopeng Wang, Elizabeth T. Borer, Jonathan D. Bakker + 25 more
Eutrophication usually impacts biodiversity, species composition, and functioning of grassland communities. Whether such effects propagate to influence the stability of these community aspects is unknown. Using standardized experiments across 55 global grasslands, we quantified the effects of nutrient addition on five…
Claire Jacquet, Charlotte Moritz, Lyne Morissette, Pierre Legagneux + 3 more
'François Massol' 'Philippe Archambault' 'Dominique Gravel'] Understanding the mechanisms responsible for stability and persistence of ecosystems is one of the greatest challenges in ecology. Robert May showed that, contrary to intuition, complex randomly built ecosystems are less likely to be stable than simpler ones.…
Charlotte Kunze, Maren Striebel, Dominik Bahlburg, Toni Schott + 2 more
Understanding the relationship between biodiversity and both the functioning and stability of ecosystems has been a central focus of ecologists for decades. A step-change in our understanding of the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship was enabled by explicit measurement of the additional functioning…
Ainhoa Magrach, Daniel Montoya, Anna Traveset
Abstract. The study of ecological stability continues to fill the pages of scientific journals almost seven decades after the first ecologists initiated this line of research. The many advances in this field have focused on understanding the stability of populations, communities or functions within single guilds or…
Jianfeng Feng, Xuhao Wan, Ruyue Wang, Shengpeng Li + 5 more
The diversity-stability relationship persists as a central ecological debate, as existing work primarily examines direct diversity and structural drivers, while empirical evidence clarifying how direct and structure-mediated pathways jointly shape ecosystem multistability remains limited. Here, we analyzed 217 global…
Libin Zhou, Qi Yang, Pubin Hong, Maowei Liang + 8 more
While the role of biodiversity in enhancing temporal stability is well established within single trophic levels, how biodiversity at one trophic level affects stability at adjacent trophic levels remains poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, we analyzed the relationships between diversity and stability both…
Àlex Giménez‐Romero, Christina Hernández, Meritxell Genovart, Roberto Salguero Gómez
The relationship between ecosystem complexity and stability remains unresolved and a mechanistic explanation for the stunning levels of biodiversity observed in communities and ecosystems is still lacking. The theoretical study of the stability of ecological communities has long been dominated by the assumption that…
Ikumi Kobayashi
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental fluctuations. Understanding general trends in ecosystem transformations in response to…
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…
Chun‐Wei Chang, Chih‐hao Hsieh, Takeshi Miki
Statistical averaging and asynchronous population dynamics as portfolio mechanisms are considered as the most important processes with which biodiversity contributes to ecosystem stability. However, portfolio theories usually regard biodiversity as a fixed property, but overlook the dynamics of biodiversity altered by…
Meghdad Saeedian, Emanuele Pigani, Amos Maritan, Samir Suweis + 1 more
'Sandro Azaele'] Understanding the conditions of feasibility and stability in ecological systems is a major challenge in theoretical ecology. The seminal work of May in 1972 and recent developments based on the theory of random matrices have shown the existence of emergent universal patterns of both stability and…
Sarah A. Vollert, Christopher Drovandi, Matthew Adams
ecological transients: methods and implications Authors: ['Sarah A. Vollert' 'Christopher Drovandi' 'Matthew Adams'] Representing ecosystems at equilibrium has been foundational for building ecological theories, forecasting species populations and planning conservation actions. The equilibrium "balance of nature" ideal…
Anne Chao, Robert K. Colwell, Johnny Shia, Simon Thorn + 12 more
When biodiversity–stability relationships are assessed from temporal patterns of species (or species assemblages) biomass or other key variables, ecological stability is commonly quantified as the inverse of the coefficient of variation (CV) or its square. However, just as biodiversity cannot be fully characterized by…
Samir Suweis, Jacopo Grilli, Amos Maritan
In the last years, a remarkable theoretical effort has been made in order to understand stability and complexity in ecological communities. The non-random structures of real ecological interaction networks has been recognized as one key ingredient contributing to the coexistence between high complexity and stability in…
Javier Jarillo, Francisco J. Cao, Frederik De Laender
There are many scales at which to quantify stability in spatial and ecological networks. Local-scale analyses focus on specific nodes of the spatial network, while regional-scale analyses consider the whole network. Similarly, species- and community-level analyses either account for single species or for the whole…
Elvia Ramírez-Carrillo, Oliver López-Corona, Juan C. Toledo-Roy, Jon C. Lovett + 7 more
Sustainability is a key concept in economic and policy debates. Nevertheless, it is usually treated only in a qualitative way and has eluded quantitative analysis. Here, we propose a sustainability index based on the premise that sustainable systems do not lose or gain Fisher Information over time. We test this…
Authors not listed
Conservation chemistry is an emerging discipline focused on preventing the loss of biodiversity through molecular-level insight and intervention. As the planet enters a mass extinction event – driven by pollution, habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, overharvesting, and disease – chemical sciences offer…
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Nitrogen fixation plays a critical role in enhancing carbon sequestration, particularly in terrestrial ecosystems where plant productivity and microbial processes are tightly linked to nitrogen availability. Biological nitrogen fixation (BNF), carried out by free-living and symbiotic microorganisms such as Rhizobium…
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Heterotrophic protists can be considered the dark matter of microbial communities in engineered water systems. They are ubiquitous and ecologically significant, yet remain largely overlooked. Although a growing body of research demonstrates their pivotal roles (e.g., predation, symbiosis, and nutrient cycling) in…
Yalin Li, John Trimmer, Steven Hand, Xinyi Zhang + 6 more
The pursuit of sustainability has catalyzed broad investment in the research, development, and deployment (RD&D) of innovative water, sanitation, and resource recovery technologies, yet the lack of transparent and agile methodologies to navigate the expansive landscape of technology development pathways remains a…