Abstract
A major goal of ecology is to discover how dynamics and structure of multi-trophic ecological communities are related. This is difficult, because whole-community data are limited and typically comprise only a snapshot of a community instead of a time series of dynamics, and mathematical models of complex system dynamics have a large number of unmeasured parameters and therefore have been only tenuously related to real systems. These are related problems, because long time-series, if they were commonly available, would enable inference of parameters. The resulting ‘plague of parameters’ means most studies of multi-species population dynamics have been very theoretical. Dynamical models parametrized using physiological allometries may offer a partial cure for the plague of parameters, and these models are increasingly used in theoretical studies. However, physiological allometries cannot determine all parameters, and the models have also rarely been directly tested against data. We confronted a model of community dynamics with data from a lake community. Many important empirical patterns were reproducible as outcomes of dynamics, and were not reproducible when parameters did not follow physiological allometries. Results validate the usefulness, when parameters follow physiological allometries, of classic differential-equation models for understanding whole-community dynamics and the structure–dynamics relationship.
Highlights
It is important theoretically and possibly for future practical application to understand the population dynamics of species in complex ecosystems and how dynamics may depend on and affect community structure
Models parametrized with physiological allometries, despite their increasing use, have virtually never been directly tested, i.e. it is largely unexamined whether the reduced parameter space contains parameter values that lead to ecologically sensible model behaviour
Results provide an important message: that allometrically parametrized differential-equation models of community dynamics can recreate, with reasonably good accuracy, important large-scale quantitative patterns commonly seen in data
Summary
It is important theoretically and possibly for future practical application to understand the population dynamics of species in complex ecosystems and how dynamics may depend on and affect community structure. Models parametrized with physiological allometries, despite their increasing use, have virtually never been directly tested, i.e. it is largely unexamined whether the reduced parameter space contains parameter values that lead to ecologically sensible model behaviour (but see [24], discussed below). Such validation efforts are important, and increasingly so, as a growing amount of research is based on insights gained from these models that are, ecologically irrelevant if the models do not accurately represent ecosystems. If parameters are not found for which the models can reproduce the gross and commonly seen patterns described above, model usefulness for any purpose will be questionable, whereas finding parameters that reproduce the patterns will support use of the models
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