Modularity and stability in ecological communities
By Jacopo Grilli, Tim Rogers, Stefano Allesina. Nature Communications, 2016
375 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Networks composed of distinct, densely connected subsystems are called modular. In ecology, it has been posited that a modular organization of species interactions would benefit the dynamical stability of communities, even though evidence supporting this hypothesis is mixed. Here we study the effect of modularity on the local stability of ecological dynamical systems, by presenting new results in random matrix theory, which are obtained using a quaternionic parameterization of the cavity method. Results show that modularity can have moderate stabilizing effects for particular parameter choices, while anti-modularity can greatly destabilize ecological networks. Modularity in food webs can be caused by spatial and temporal mismatches in interactions. Here, Jacopo Grilli, Tim Rogers and Stefano Allesina show that modularity, contrary to expectations, does not generally help stabilizing ecological communities.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/203bb105abaf1f0a5edfcab331b7c5f007c873bd
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Resolving Food-Web Structure (2020, background): “Modularity and/or nestedness might promote diversity and/or stability, or they might not (Bastolla et al. 2009, Thébault & Fontaine 2010, Allesina & Tang 2012, James et al. 2012, Grilli et al. 2016).”