Index

1. Types of complex communities

   1. Competitive communities

   2. Food web

2. May's paradigm

3. Are Specis-rich communities robust to abrupt enviromental changes?: "Catastrophic shifts"

4. Hubbel's unified neutral theory

5. Metacommunity theory

Key questions

• Why, and how, multiple stable states can emerge in species-rich ecosystems remain?

R. May's paradigm

[Reference]

• Review

  • Akjouj, I., Barbier, M., Clenet, M., Hachem, W., Maïda, M., Massol, F., ... & Tran, V. C. (2024). Complex systems in ecology: a guided tour with large Lotka–Volterra models and random matrices. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 480(2285), 20230284.

Are Specis-rich communities robust to abrupt enviromental changes?: "Catastrophic shifts"

• Aguadé-Gorgorió et al. (2024) Ecol. Lett. shows that Three factors (1. the fraction of initial conditions that reach a stable state without fluctuations (S ) (Beninca et al., 2008; Hu et al., 2022); 2. the number of observed stable states (Ω), and 3. for each of the states in the list, its diversity of surviving species (D) ) are cues to categorize four types of ecological outcomes (1. Local multistability / 2. Mutual exclusion / 3. Global bistability / 4. Clique).

• Keywords

  • Clique: Small subsets of multiple coexisting species in a species-rich community

<Reference>

• Aguadé-Gorgorió, G., & Kefi, S. (2024). Alternative cliques of coexisting species in complex ecosystems. Journal of Physics: Complexity.

• Aguadé‐Gorgorió, G., Arnoldi, J. F., Barbier, M., & Kéfi, S. (2024). A taxonomy of multiple stable states in complex ecological communities. Ecology Letters, 27(4), e14413.

• Hu, J., Amor, D.R., Barbier, M., Bunin, G. & Gore, J. (2022) Emergent phases of ecological diversity and dynamics mapped in microcosms. Science, 378(6615), 85–89.

• Beninca, E., Huisman, J., Heerkloss, R., Jöhnk, K.D., Branco, P., Van Nes, E.H. et al. (2008) Chaos in a long-term experiment with a plankton community. Nature, 451(7180), 822–825.

A chain length in food web

• Why do chain lengths tend to be short such as two or three chains?

Metacommunity ecology

• Present findings

1. Fragmentation

2. Migration rate

3. Network topology

Stability, robustness, & resilience

• Stability

After a system reach equilibrium, the state of the system cannot change due to internal pressures.

e.g. convergence stability & evolutionary stability in adaptive dynamics theory

• Robustness

After a system reach equilibrium, the state of the system cannot change due to the change in parameters.

• Resilience

Suppose that after a system reach equilibrium, the state of the system change due to the perturbation. The system can return to the state which exists before the state transition.

Alternative stable states

• Alternative attractor

  • Säterberg, T., McCann, K. Detecting alternative attractors in ecosystem dynamics. Commun Biol 4, 975 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02471-w

  • Tan, E., Algar, S.D., Corrêa, D. et al. Network representations of attractors for change point detection. Commun Phys 6, 340 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-023-01463-y

Environmental & demographic stochasticity

• Lottery model

[Reference]

• • Muko, S., & Iwasa, Y. (2000). Species coexistence by permanent spatial heterogeneity in a lottery model. Theoretical Population Biology, 57(3), 273-284.

Rarity of chaos & examples

Rarity:

• Rogers, T.L., Johnson, B.J. & Munch, S.B. Chaos is not rare in natural ecosystems. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 1105–1111 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01787-y

Experiment:

• Boaretto, B.R.R., Budzinski, R.C., Rossi, K.L. et al. Discriminating chaotic and stochastic time series using permutation entropy and artificial neural networks. Sci Rep 11, 15789 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95231-z

• Benincà, E., Huisman, J., Heerkloss, R., Jöhnk, K. D., Branco, P., Van Nes, E. H., ... & Ellner, S. P. (2008). Chaos in a long-term experiment with a plankton community. Nature, 451(7180), 822-825. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06512

Self-organized criticality; 自己組織化臨界現象

• Helmrich, S., Arias, A., Lochead, G. et al. Signatures of self-organized criticality in an ultracold atomic gas. Nature 577, 481–486 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1908-6

Evolutionary assembly model

• Tokita, K., & Yasutomi, A. (2003). Emergence of a complex and stable network in a model ecosystem with extinction and mutation. Theoretical population biology, 63(2), 131-146. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0040-5809(02)00038-2

• Shimada, T. A universal transition in the robustness of evolving open systems. Sci Rep 4, 4082 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep04082

• Drossel, B., Higgs, P. G., & McKane, A. J. (2001). The influence of predator–prey population dynamics on the long-term evolution of food web structure. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 208(1), 91-107. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2000.2203

Interesting papers

• Species richness versus interaction links

  • Ings, T. C., Montoya, J. M., Bascompte, J., Blüthgen, N., Brown, L., Dormann, C. F., ... & Woodward, G. (2009). Ecological networks–beyond food webs. Journal of animal ecology, 78(1), 253-269. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2656.2008.01460.x

  • Thompson, R. M., Brose, U., Dunne, J. A., Hall, R. O., Hladyz, S., Kitching, R. L., ... & Tylianakis, J. M. (2012). Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity. Trends in ecology & evolution, 27(12), 689-697. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2012.08.005

  • Carpentier, C., Barabás, G., Spaak, J.W. et al. Reinterpreting the relationship between number of species and number of links connects community structure and stability. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 1102–1109 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01468-2

• Nestedness versus modularity

  • Fortuna, M. A., Stouffer, D. B., Olesen, J. M., Jordano, P., Mouillot, D., Krasnov, B. R., ... & Bascompte, J. (2010). Nestedness versus modularity in ecological networks: two sides of the same coin?. Journal of animal ecology, 811-817. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2656.2010.01688.x

• Analysing ecological networks of species interactions

  • Delmas, E., Besson, M., Brice, M. H., Burkle, L. A., Dalla Riva, G. V., Fortin, M. J., ... & Poisot, T. (2019). Analysing ecological networks of species interactions. Biological Reviews, 94(1), 16-36.

• “Trophic exclusion” principle

  • Behrenfeld, M.J., O’Malley, R., Boss, E. et al. Phytoplankton biodiversity and the inverted paradox. ISME COMMUN. 1, 52 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43705-021-00056-6