Stability and Variability in Competitive Communities

Ives, Anthony R.; Gross, Kay; Klug, Jennifer L.

doi:10.1126/science.286.5439.542

Cited by 308 publications

(364 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…5), often termed increased community biomass stability (Ives and Hughes, 2002). This result relies upon the assumption that species do not respond to environmental variation in a perfectly correlated way, a phenomenon known as the "portfolio effect" (Ives et al, 1999;Stearns, 15 2000). The result derived by Ives & Hughes (2002) was shown to apply more generally than first thought (Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, 5 randomly assembled communities have proven a popular starting point when asking questions of community stability (Chen and Cohen, 2001;Cohen and Newman, 1985;Ives and Hughes, 2002;Ives and Carpenter, 2007;Ives et al, 1999;Ives et al, 2000;Jansen and Kokkoris, 2003;Rozdilsky and Stone, 2001) and can serve as a useful null hypothesis for comparison with communities assembled under different ecological and evolutionary rules. 10…”

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confidence: 99%

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Increasing community size and connectance can increase stability in competitive communities

Fowler

2009

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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To cite this version:Mike S. Fowler. Increasing community size and connectance can increase stability in competitive communities.Journal of Theoretical Biology, Elsevier, 2009, 258 (2) This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.A c c e p t e d m a n u s c r i p t (0)9 191 57730 Fax: +358 (0)9 191 57694 e-mail: mike.fowler@helsinki.fi ABSTRACT: The relationship between community complexity and stability has been the subject of an enduring debate in ecology over the last 50 years. Results from early model 10 communities showed that increased complexity is associated with decreased local stability. I demonstrate that increasing both the number of species in a community, and the connectance between these species results in an increased probability of local stability in discrete-time competitive communities, when some species would show unstable dynamics in the absence of competition. This is shown analytically for a simple case and across a wider range of 15 community sizes using simulations, where individual species have dynamics that can range from stable point equilibria to periodic or more complex. Increasing the number of competitive links in the community reduces per-capita growth rates through an increase in competitive feedback, stabilising oscillating dynamics. This result was robust to the introduction of a trade-off between competitive ability and intrinsic growth rate and changes 20

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Increasing community size and connectance can increase stability in competitive communities

Fowler

2009

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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“…Heino et al 2000;Lehman & Tilman 2000;Ives & Hughes 2002). Population density in these types of models can be thought of population biomass without loss of generality; therefore, the sum of all community members' densities can represent the community biomass, which will affect individual species' dynamics directly through the competition terms in equation (2.1), indicating that the level of population synchrony will impact upon dynamics at the community level (Ives et al 1999;Ripa & Ives 2003). In addition to the degree of correlation between species-specific noise terms, population synchrony is also affected by noise colour, such that increased noise reddening decreases the correlation between populations (Ripa & Ives 2003;Greenman & Benton 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, the response of different species to the same environmental signal may be correlated or uncorrelated. The responses of communities to different environmental correlation and autocorrelation structures have only recently started to be explored (Ives et al 1999;Ripa & Ives 2003;Greenman & Benton 2005;Ruokolainen et al 2007), and the behaviour of complex systems under environmental forcing is not yet completely understood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community extinction patterns in coloured environments

Ruokolainen

Fowler

2008

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Understanding community responses to environmental variation is a fundamental aspect of ecological research, with direct ecological, conservation and economic implications. Here, we examined the role of the magnitude, correlation and autocorrelation structures of environmental variation on species' extinction risk (ER), and the probability of actual extinction events in model competitive communities. Both ER and probability increased with increasing positive autocorrelation when species responded independently to the environment, yet both decreased with a strong correlation between species-specific responses. These results are framed in terms of the synchrony between-and magnitude of variation within-species population sizes and are explained in terms of differences in noise amplification under different conditions. The simulation results are robust to changes in the strength of interspecific density dependence, and whether noise affects density-independent or density-dependent population processes. Similar patterns arose under different ranges of noise severity when these different model assumptions were examined. We compared our results with those from an analytically derived solution, which failed to capture many features of the simulation results.

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“…[10][11][12][13]. Although theoretical studies have also considered stability measures based on variability [14][15][16], the link with resilience is not obvious. Indeed, in contrast with resilience, variability is caused by persistent perturbations, depends on the direction and intensity of these perturbations, and on the ecosystem variable that is observed, such as total biomass.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience, reactivity and variability: A mathematical comparison of ecological stability measures

Arnoldi

Loreau

Haegeman

2016

Journal of Theoretical Biology

131

143

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In theoretical studies, the most commonly used measure of ecological stability is resilience: ecosystems asymptotic rate of return to equilibrium after a pulse-perturbation −or shock. A complementary notion of growing popularity is reactivity: the strongest initial response to shocks. On the other hand, empirical stability is often quantified as the inverse of temporal variability, directly estimated on data, and reflecting ecosystems response to persistent and erratic environmental disturbances. It is unclear whether and how this empirical measure is related to resilience and reactivity. Here, we establish a connection by introducing two variability-based stability measures belonging to the theoretical realm of resilience and reactivity. We call them intrinsic, stochastic and deterministic invariability; respectively defined as the inverse of the strongest stationary response to white-noise and to single-frequency perturbations. We prove that they predict ecosystems worst response to broad classes of disturbances, including realistic models of environmental fluctuations.We show that they are intermediate measures between resilience and reactivity and that, although defined with respect to persistent perturbations, they can be related to the whole transient regime following a shock, making them more integrative notions than reactivity and resilience. We argue that invariability measures constitute a stepping stone, and discuss the challenges ahead to further unify theoretical and empirical approaches to stability.

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Stability and Variability in Competitive Communities

Cited by 308 publications

References 16 publications

Increasing community size and connectance can increase stability in competitive communities

Increasing community size and connectance can increase stability in competitive communities

Community extinction patterns in coloured environments

Resilience, reactivity and variability: A mathematical comparison of ecological stability measures

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