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. 2016 Apr 13:6:24478.
doi: 10.1038/srep24478.

Food-web complexity, meta-community complexity and community stability

A Mougi  1 , M Kondoh  2
Affiliations

Food-web complexity, meta-community complexity and community stability

A Mougi et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

What allows interacting, diverse species to coexist in nature has been a central question in ecology, ever since the theoretical prediction that a complex community should be inherently unstable. Although the role of spatiality in species coexistence has been recognized, its application to more complex systems has been less explored. Here, using a meta-community model of food web, we show that meta-community complexity, measured by the number of local food webs and their connectedness, elicits a self-regulating, negative-feedback mechanism and thus stabilizes food-web dynamics. Moreover, the presence of meta-community complexity can give rise to a positive food-web complexity-stability effect. Spatiality may play a more important role in stabilizing dynamics of complex, real food webs than expected from ecological theory based on the models of simpler food webs.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Relationships between the spatial coupling strength (M) and stability.
(A) Effect of species richness (N). We assume P = 0.5. (B) Effect of proportion of connected pairs (P). We assume N = 50. Colours indicate different species richness and proportion of connected pairs. sil is set to a random value from [0, 1]. HN = 2, and HP = 1.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Relationship between the spatial complexity (HN and HP) and stability with varying spatial coupling strength (M).
sil is set to a random value from [0, 0.1]. N = 20. P = 0.5.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Complexity-stability relationships with varying spatial complexity (HN and HP).
sil is set to a random value from [0, 0.1]. We assume P = 0.5 and M = 1.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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