Prediction of collapse process and tipping points for mutualistic and competitive networks with k-core method

Abstract

Ecosystems generally have the self-adapting ability to resist various external pressures or disturbances, which is always called resilience. However, once the external disturbances exceed the tipping points of the system resilience, the consequences would be catastrophic, and eventually lead the ecosystem to complete collapse. We capture the collapse process of ecosystems represented by plant-pollinator networks with the k-core nested structural method, and find that a sufficiently weak interaction strength or a sufficiently large competition weight can cause the structure of the ecosystem to collapse from its smallest k-core towards its largest k-core. Then we give the tipping points of structure and dynamic collapse of the entire system from the one-dimensional dynamic function of the ecosystem. Our work provides an intuitive and precise description of the dynamic process of ecosystem collapse under multiple interactions, and provides theoretical insights for further avoiding the occurrence of ecosystem collapse.