Brinck Katharina, Jensen Henrik Jeldtoft
Imperial College London, Department of Mathematics, Centre for Complexity Science, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Imperial College London, Department of Mathematics, Centre for Complexity Science, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
J Theor Biol. 2017 Sep 7;428:18-25. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2017.06.010. Epub 2017 Jun 10.
General patterns in ecosystem development can shed light on driving forces behind ecosystem formation and recovery and have been of long interest. In recent years, the need for integrative and process oriented approaches to capture ecosystem growth, development and organisation, as well as the scope of information theory as a descriptive tool has been addressed from various sides. However data collection of ecological network flows is difficult and tedious and comprehensive models are lacking. We use a hierarchical version of the Tangled Nature Model of evolutionary ecology to study the relationship between structure, flow and organisation in model ecosystems, their development over evolutionary time scales and their relation to ecosystem stability. Our findings support the validity of ecosystem ascendency as a meaningful measure of ecosystem organisation, which increases over evolutionary time scales and significantly drops during periods of disturbance. The results suggest a general trend towards both higher integrity and increased stability driven by functional and structural ecosystem coadaptation.
生态系统发展的一般模式能够揭示生态系统形成与恢复背后的驱动力，长期以来一直备受关注。近年来，从各个方面探讨了采用综合的、面向过程的方法来描述生态系统的生长、发展和组织，以及信息论作为一种描述工具的适用范围。然而，生态网络流的数据收集困难且繁琐，并且缺乏全面的模型。我们使用进化生态学的缠结自然模型的层次版本，来研究模型生态系统中结构、流和组织之间的关系、它们在进化时间尺度上的发展以及它们与生态系统稳定性的关系。我们的研究结果支持生态系统优势度作为生态系统组织的一种有意义度量的有效性，它在进化时间尺度上增加，在干扰期间显著下降。结果表明，在功能和结构的生态系统共同适应的驱动下，存在着向更高完整性和更高稳定性发展的总体趋势。
