 What makes ecological systems reactive?Robin E. Snyder Theoretical Population Biology, 2010, vol. 77, issue 4, 243-249 Abstract: Although perturbations from a stable equilibrium must ultimately vanish, they can grow initially, and the maximum initial growth rate is called reactivity. Reactivity thus identifies systems that may undergo transient population surges or drops in response to perturbations; however, we lack biological and mathematical intuition about what makes a system reactive. This paper presents upper and lower bounds on reactivity for an arbitrary linearized model, explores their strictness, and discusses their biological implications. I find that less stable systems (i.e. systems with long transients) have a smaller possible range of reactivities for which no perturbations grow. Systems with more species have a higher capacity to be reactive, assuming species interactions do not weaken too rapidly as the number of species increases. Finally, I find that in discrete time, reactivity is determined largely by mean interaction strength and neither discrete nor continuous time reactivity are sensitive to food web topology. Keywords: Transient dynamics; Reactivity; Interaction strength; Species richness; Food web (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:77:y:2010:i:4:p:243-249 DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2010.03.004 Access Statistics for this article Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier |
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