Hatton Ian A, Mazzarisi Onofrio, Altieri Ada, Smerlak Matteo
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0E8, Canada.
Science. 2024 Mar 15;383(6688):eadg8488. doi: 10.1126/science.adg8488.
The worldwide loss of species diversity brings urgency to understanding how diverse ecosystems maintain stability. Whereas early ecological ideas and classic observations suggested that stability increases with diversity, ecological theory makes the opposite prediction, leading to the long-standing "diversity-stability debate." Here, we show that this puzzle can be resolved if growth scales as a sublinear power law with biomass (exponent <1), exhibiting a form of population self-regulation analogous to models of individual ontogeny. We show that competitive interactions among populations with sublinear growth do not lead to exclusion, as occurs with logistic growth, but instead promote stability at higher diversity. Our model realigns theory with classic observations and predicts large-scale macroecological patterns. However, it makes an unsettling prediction: Biodiversity loss may accelerate the destabilization of ecosystems.
全球物种多样性的丧失使得理解多样的生态系统如何维持稳定性变得紧迫。早期的生态学观点和经典观察表明稳定性会随着多样性的增加而提高，然而生态理论却做出了相反的预测，从而引发了长期存在的“多样性 - 稳定性辩论”。在此，我们表明，如果生长随生物量呈次线性幂律（指数<1）增长，呈现出一种类似于个体个体发育模型的种群自我调节形式，那么这个谜题就能得到解决。我们发现，具有次线性增长的种群之间的竞争相互作用不会像逻辑斯谛增长那样导致排斥，而是在更高的多样性水平上促进稳定性。我们的模型使理论与经典观察结果重新契合，并预测了大规模的宏观生态模式。然而，它也做出了一个令人不安的预测：生物多样性丧失可能会加速生态系统的不稳定。
