English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Does an ecological community allow stable coexistence? Identifying thegeneral principles that determine the answer to this question is a centralproblem of theoretical ecology. Random matrix theory approaches have uncoveredthe general trends of the effect of competitive, mutualistic, and predator-preyinteractions between species on stability of coexistence. However, anecological community is determined not only by the counts of these differentinteraction types, but also by their network arrangement. This cannot beaccounted for in a direct statistical description that would enable randommatrix theory approaches. Here, we therefore develop a different approach, ofexhaustive analysis of small ecological communities, to show that thisarrangement of interactions can influence stability of coexistence more thanthese general trends. We analyse all interaction networks of $N\leqslant 5$species with Lotka-Volterra dynamics by combining exact results for $N\leqslant3$ species and numerical exploration. Surprisingly, we find that a very smallsubset of these networks are "impossible ecologies", in which stablecoexistence is non-trivially impossible. We prove that the possibility ofstable coexistence in general ecologies is determined by similarly rare"irreducible ecologies". By random sampling of interaction strengths, we thenshow that the probability of stable coexistence varies over many orders ofmagnitude even in ecologies that differ only in the network arrangement ofidentical ecological interactions. Finally, we demonstrate that our approachcan reveal the effect of evolutionary or environmental perturbations of theinteraction network. Overall, this work reveals the importance of the fullstructure of the network of interactions for stability of coexistence inecological communities.

Impossible ecologies: Interaction networks and stability of coexistence in ecological communities