Abstract
The growing realization of a looming biodiversity crisis has inspired considerable progress in the quest to link biodiversity, structure and ecosystem function. Here we construct a method that bridges low- and high-diversity approaches to food web theory by elucidating the connection between the stability of the basic building block of food webs and the mean stability properties of large random food web networks. Applying this theoretical framework to common food web models reveals two key findings. First, in almost all cases, high-diversity food web models yield a stability relationship between weak and strong interactions that are compatible in every way to simple low-diversity models. And second, the models that generate the recently discovered phenomena of being purely stabilized by increasing interaction strength correspond to the biologically implausible assumption of perfect interaction strength symmetry.
Highlights
The growing realization of a looming biodiversity crisis has inspired considerable progress in the quest to link biodiversity, structure and ecosystem function
Global human development has begun to erode this natural complexity making it important that we rapidly assess the structural aspects of food webs that are critical to the stable function of our lifesupport systems[1]
There has been little attempt to bridge the understanding of stability results from population ecology to whole food webs
Summary
The growing realization of a looming biodiversity crisis has inspired considerable progress in the quest to link biodiversity, structure and ecosystem function. We consider results from whole food web models where current and historical research finds a mixture of stability responses that seem either partially, or wholly, incongruent with this simple general rule[2,3]. We revisit these results using the elegant mathematical result of Sommers et al.[12] to show that both historical and recent results are singular endpoints that hide a general result that is equivalent to the population and modular results. Low- and high-diversity food webs generally yield qualitatively similar stability results
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