Modularity and stability in ecological communities

Networks composed of distinct, densely connected subsystems are called modular. In ecology, it has been posited that a modular organization of species interactions would benefit the dynamical stability of communities, even though evidence supporting this hypothesis is mixed. Here we study the effect of modularity on the local stability of ecological dynamical systems, by presenting new results in random matrix theory, which are obtained using a quaternionic parameterization of the cavity method. Results show that modularity can have moderate stabilizing effects for particular parameter choices, while anti-modularity can greatly destabilize ecological networks. Modularity in food webs can be caused by spatial and temporal mismatches in interactions. Here, Jacopo Grilli, Tim Rogers and Stefano Allesina show that modularity, contrary to expectations, does not generally help stabilizing ecological communities.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2016-06-23

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Computer Science, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/ncomms12031PMID 27337386PMCID 4931019
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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