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Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems
What drives the stability, or instability, of complex ecosystems? This question sits at the heart of community ecology and has motivated a large body of theoretical work exploring how community properties shape ecosystem dynamics. However, the overwhelming majority of current theory assumes that spe...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10555844/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37592022 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02158-x |
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author | Yang, Yuguang Foster, Kevin R. Coyte, Katharine Z. Li, Aming |
author_facet | Yang, Yuguang Foster, Kevin R. Coyte, Katharine Z. Li, Aming |
author_sort | Yang, Yuguang |
collection | PubMed |
description | What drives the stability, or instability, of complex ecosystems? This question sits at the heart of community ecology and has motivated a large body of theoretical work exploring how community properties shape ecosystem dynamics. However, the overwhelming majority of current theory assumes that species interactions are instantaneous, meaning that changes in the abundance of one species will lead to immediate changes in the abundances of its partners. In practice, time delays in how species respond to one another are widespread across ecological contexts, yet the impact of these delays on ecosystems remains unclear. Here we derive a new body of theory to comprehensively study the impact of time delays on ecological stability. We find that time delays are important for ecosystem stability. Large delays are typically destabilizing but, surprisingly, short delays can substantially increase community stability. Moreover, in stark contrast to delay-free systems, delays dictate that communities with more abundant species can be less stable than ones with less abundant species. Finally, we show that delays fundamentally shift how species interactions impact ecosystem stability, with communities of mixed interaction types becoming the most stable class of ecosystem. Our work demonstrates that time delays can be critical for the stability of complex ecosystems. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10555844 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-105558442023-10-07 Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems Yang, Yuguang Foster, Kevin R. Coyte, Katharine Z. Li, Aming Nat Ecol Evol Article What drives the stability, or instability, of complex ecosystems? This question sits at the heart of community ecology and has motivated a large body of theoretical work exploring how community properties shape ecosystem dynamics. However, the overwhelming majority of current theory assumes that species interactions are instantaneous, meaning that changes in the abundance of one species will lead to immediate changes in the abundances of its partners. In practice, time delays in how species respond to one another are widespread across ecological contexts, yet the impact of these delays on ecosystems remains unclear. Here we derive a new body of theory to comprehensively study the impact of time delays on ecological stability. We find that time delays are important for ecosystem stability. Large delays are typically destabilizing but, surprisingly, short delays can substantially increase community stability. Moreover, in stark contrast to delay-free systems, delays dictate that communities with more abundant species can be less stable than ones with less abundant species. Finally, we show that delays fundamentally shift how species interactions impact ecosystem stability, with communities of mixed interaction types becoming the most stable class of ecosystem. Our work demonstrates that time delays can be critical for the stability of complex ecosystems. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-08-17 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC10555844/ /pubmed/37592022 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02158-x Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Yang, Yuguang Foster, Kevin R. Coyte, Katharine Z. Li, Aming Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems |
title | Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems |
title_full | Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems |
title_fullStr | Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems |
title_full_unstemmed | Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems |
title_short | Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems |
title_sort | time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10555844/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37592022 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02158-x |
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