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Complexity and stability revisited
Author(s) -
Jansen Vincent A. A.,
Kokkoris Giorgos D.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
ecology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.852
H-Index - 265
eISSN - 1461-0248
pISSN - 1461-023X
DOI - 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00464.x
Subject(s) - stability (learning theory) , variance (accounting) , ecosystem , ecological stability , ecology , simple (philosophy) , mathematics , econometrics , statistics , statistical physics , computer science , biology , economics , physics , epistemology , philosophy , accounting , machine learning
Abstract Since Robert May's work on random community matrices it has been known that stability tends to decrease with complexity. Recently, it was shown that this is not necessarily true in competitive ecosystems. We investigated the stability of random ecosystems and found that it can largely be predicted by simple matrix statistics such as the mean and the variance of the interaction coefficients. We use this to explain why stability can increase as well as decrease with complexity in ecological communities. We argue that the variance, and to a lesser extent the mean, of the interaction coefficients go a long way in explaining patterns in the stability of ecosystems.