Abstract
What allows interacting, diverse species to coexist in nature has been a central question in ecology, ever since the theoretical prediction that a complex community should be inherently unstable. Although the role of spatiality in species coexistence has been recognized, its application to more complex systems has been less explored. Here, using a meta-community model of food web, we show that meta-community complexity, measured by the number of local food webs and their connectedness, elicits a self-regulating, negative-feedback mechanism and thus stabilizes food-web dynamics. Moreover, the presence of meta-community complexity can give rise to a positive food-web complexity-stability effect. Spatiality may play a more important role in stabilizing dynamics of complex, real food webs than expected from ecological theory based on the models of simpler food webs.
Highlights
A community composition to return to the original equilibrium after a small perturbation)
When the two local food webs were coupled by migration (M > 0), the stability of the complex food web increased to that of a simple food web, revealing the stabilizing force of spatial complexity
Spatial heterogeneity in species composition among local food webs is necessary for the stabilizing effect to occur (Supplementary Fig. S1), because passive movement from high- to low-density local food webs generates the self-regulating, stabilizing effect
Summary
A community composition to return to the original equilibrium after a small perturbation). Consider a meta-community in which organisms randomly move between numerous coexisting local food webs. Food-web complexity can be quantified by the number of species involved in a local food web, N, and the probability that a pair of species is connected by a trophic link, P.
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