Department of Physics and Astronomy, School of Natural Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), 07122, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Nat Commun. 2020 Nov 27;11(1):6032. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19824-4.
In his seminal work in the 1970s, Robert May suggested that there is an upper limit to the number of species that can be sustained in stable equilibrium by an ecosystem. This deduction was at odds with both intuition and the observed complexity of many natural ecosystems. The so-called stability-diversity debate ensued, and the discussion about the factors contributing to ecosystem stability or instability continues to this day. We show in this work that dispersal can be a destabilising influence. To do this, we combine ideas from Alan Turing's work on pattern formation with May's random-matrix approach. We demonstrate how a stable equilibrium in a complex ecosystem with trophic structure can become unstable with the introduction of dispersal in space, and we discuss the factors which contribute to this effect. Our work highlights that adding more details to the model of May can give rise to more ways for an ecosystem to become unstable. Making May's simple model more realistic is therefore unlikely to entirely remove the upper bound on complexity.
在 20 世纪 70 年代，罗伯特·梅（Robert May）的开创性工作表明，一个生态系统能够稳定平衡地维持的物种数量存在上限。这一推断与直觉和许多自然生态系统的实际复杂性相矛盾。因此，随之产生了所谓的稳定性-多样性争论，关于导致生态系统稳定或不稳定的因素的讨论一直持续到今天。在这项工作中，我们表明扩散可能是一种不稳定的影响。为此，我们将艾伦·图灵（Alan Turing）关于模式形成的思想与梅的随机矩阵方法结合起来。我们证明了，在具有营养结构的复杂生态系统中，一个稳定的平衡可以通过在空间中引入扩散而变得不稳定，我们还讨论了促成这种效应的因素。我们的工作表明，在梅的模型中增加更多的细节可以产生更多的方式使生态系统变得不稳定。因此，使梅的简单模型更加现实不太可能完全消除复杂性的上限。
