Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

Get Involved!
Contact: Caitlin Lorraine McShea, Program Manager, cmcshea@santafe.edu

Correlation between interaction strengths drives stability in large ecological networks

From Complex Time
Category
General Reference
author-supplied keywords
Complexity
Food webs
Pairwise correlation
Population dynamics
Stability
keywords
authors
Si Tang
Samraat Pawar
Stefano Allesina
title
Correlation between interaction strengths drives stability in large ecological networks
type
generic
year
2014
source
Ecology Letters
pages
1094-1100
volume
17
issue
9
publisher
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
link
https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/84f95ce6-2b95-3e18-8d4f-36b16efb417b/(Error!"Error!" is not a number.)

Abstract

Food webs have markedly non-random network structure. Ecologists maintain that this non-random structure is key for stability, since large random ecological networks would invariably be unstable and thus should not be observed empirically. Here we show that a simple yet overlooked feature of natural food webs, the correlation between the effects of consumers on resources and those of resources on consumers, substantially accounts for their stability. Remarkably, random food webs built by preserving just the distribution and correlation of interaction strengths have stability properties similar to those of the corresponding empirical systems. Surprisingly, we find that the effect of topological network structure on stability, which has been the focus of countless studies, is small compared to that of correlation. Hence, any study of the effects of network structure on stability must first take into account the distribution and correlation of interaction strengths.

Counts

Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days.
98
Page views
0

Identifiers

  • doi: 10.1111/ele.12312 (Google search)
  • issn: 14610248
  • sgr: 84905256618
  • isbn: 1461-0248
  • pmid: 24946877
  • scopus: 2-s2.0-84905256618
  • pui: 53203057

Add a file