How Complexity Affects Structural Stability: Using Protist Microcosms and Mathematical Modeling to Navigate Realism in Theoretical Ecology

Overview

The nature of how ecosystem complexity affects stability has been long debated by theoretical ecologists. This broad concept, which encompasses how species richness, interactions, and community structure impact an ecosystem’s ability to remain at or return to equilibrium, is in part challenging to research because of the practical inability to use large-scale experimental data in mathematical quantifications of complexity and stability. This experiment addresses this challenge using a recently developed method to model species abundances in all possible community compositions of four protists using data from a small set of experimental ecosystems. In addition, a novel method to quantify structural stability was proposed that uses the average magnitude of change in model parameters before species no longer coexist. The model accurately described the data (R2 = 0.7) and the results suggested that species richness, the measurement of complexity used in this experiment, is negatively correlated with structural stability with respect to change in both growth rates and interaction strengths. These results add to current research on the topic of complexity and stability and additionally show promise to be applied to larger communities. Further research is needed to confirm these conclusions due to the low number of species considered and large confidence intervals of species abundance.

Competition history

• JSHS 2022 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.