No complexity–stability relationship in empirical ecosystems

Claire Jacquet (), Charlotte Moritz, Lyne Morissette, Pierre Legagneux, François Massol, Philippe Archambault and Dominique Gravel
Additional contact information
Claire Jacquet: Université du Québec à Rimouski
Charlotte Moritz: Institut des Sciences de la Mer de Rimouski, Université du Québec à Rimouski
Lyne Morissette: M-Expertise Marine
Pierre Legagneux: Université du Québec à Rimouski
François Massol: Unité Evolution, Ecologie & Paléontologie (EEP), SPICI group, CNRS UMR 8198, Université Lille 1, Bâtiment SN2
Philippe Archambault: Institut des Sciences de la Mer de Rimouski, Université du Québec à Rimouski
Dominique Gravel: Université du Québec à Rimouski

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Understanding the mechanisms responsible for stability and persistence of ecosystems is one of the greatest challenges in ecology. Robert May showed that, contrary to intuition, complex randomly built ecosystems are less likely to be stable than simpler ones. Few attempts have been tried to test May’s prediction empirically, and we still ignore what is the actual complexity–stability relationship in natural ecosystems. Here we perform a stability analysis of 116 quantitative food webs sampled worldwide. We find that classic descriptors of complexity (species richness, connectance and interaction strength) are not associated with stability in empirical food webs. Further analysis reveals that a correlation between the effects of predators on prey and those of prey on predators, combined with a high frequency of weak interactions, stabilize food web dynamics relative to the random expectation. We conclude that empirical food webs have several non-random properties contributing to the absence of a complexity–stability relationship.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12573 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms12573

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12573

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().