Abstract:Deterministic chaos has been studied extensively in various fields. Some of the ideas emerging out of these studies have been put to novel applications. However, it is unknown whether natural ecological systems support chaotic dynamics. There is no concrete evidence which suggests that ecosystem evolution is chaotic in certain situations. This is very intriguing because ecosystems do possess all the necessary qualifications to be able to support such a dynamical behavior. The present paper attempts to answer … Show more
“…Although ecological models were among the first examples of chaos, 35 it was often argued that chaos should disappear when more ecological details are taken into account. 36,37 By application of generalized models it has been shown that double Hopf bifurcations generally exist in food chains with more than three trophic levels.…”
Section: Some Results On Global Dynamicsmentioning
Ecological systems are commonly studied by very concrete conventional models or very abstract random matrix models. Here we review and extend the approach of generalized structural kinetic modeling, that offers an intermediate way between these extremes. Generalized models describe systems with a specific structure, but do not restrict the processes in the model to specific functional forms. The approach is based on the construction of a locally linear model in every point of parameter space, in such a way that each element of the model is directly accessible to measurement and has a well defined ecological interpretation. Here we show that generalized models can be used to study the local asymptotic stability of steady states and reveal certain features of the global dynamics. Among other examples we present results on spatial predator-prey system and a complex food web.
“…Although ecological models were among the first examples of chaos, 35 it was often argued that chaos should disappear when more ecological details are taken into account. 36,37 By application of generalized models it has been shown that double Hopf bifurcations generally exist in food chains with more than three trophic levels.…”
Section: Some Results On Global Dynamicsmentioning
Ecological systems are commonly studied by very concrete conventional models or very abstract random matrix models. Here we review and extend the approach of generalized structural kinetic modeling, that offers an intermediate way between these extremes. Generalized models describe systems with a specific structure, but do not restrict the processes in the model to specific functional forms. The approach is based on the construction of a locally linear model in every point of parameter space, in such a way that each element of the model is directly accessible to measurement and has a well defined ecological interpretation. Here we show that generalized models can be used to study the local asymptotic stability of steady states and reveal certain features of the global dynamics. Among other examples we present results on spatial predator-prey system and a complex food web.
“…Predatorprey interaction is the most common. There are two types of predators: (i) specialists and (ii) generalists [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. A specialist predator feeds only one food.…”
Section: Specialist and Generalist Predators Our Modelmentioning
Two models with four components of chain populations are considered. In the model, a prey population X is predated by individuals of a specialist predator population Y, and another prey population Z is predated by individuals of a generalist predator population U. This model is governed by a system of four nonlinear first order ordinary differential equations. To study the dynamics of the food chain model, the mentioned system of ordinary differential equations solved numerically. One of the biological parameters varied in a sufficiently large range and its effects on the dynamics of the system are observed. Along the w axis of the predating rate of the specialist predator Y , around four points
“…One question that has been discussed in the ecological literature for quite some time is whether chaotic dynamics occur in natural food webs (May 1987;Upadhyay et al 1998;Rai and Schaffer 2001). On the one hand, even some of the simplest ecological models exhibit chaotic dynamics (e.g., May 1974May , 1976Edwards and Yool 2000).…”
Section: Equivalence Of More Complex Food Websmentioning
An important challenge in theoretical ecology is to find good coarse-grained representations of complex food webs. Here, we use the approach of generalized modeling to show that it may be possible to formulate a coarse-graining algorithm that conserves the local dynamics of the model exactly. We show examples of food webs with a different number of species that have exactly identical local bifurcation diagrams. Based on these observations, we formulate a conjecture governing which populations of complex food webs can be grouped together into a single variable without changing the local dynamics. As an illustration, we use this conjecture to show that chaotic regions generically exist in the parameter space of a class of food webs with more than three trophic levels. While our conjecture is at present only applicable to relatively special cases, we believe that its applicability could be greatly extended if a more sophisticated mapping of parameters were used in the model reduction.
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