2013/10/31 by Andrzej Pękalski, Janusz Szwabiński
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Biology #Computer science #Detritus #Ecology #Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies #Ecosystem #Environmental science #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Food web #Geography #Machine learning #Plant and animal studies #Resource (disambiguation) #Stability (learning theory) #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.89.052714
published as Phys. Rev. E 89, 052714 (2014) · 11 pages, 12 figures
arxiv created 2014/04/14 · openalex publication_date 2014/05/28 · arxiv updated 2014/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
One of the central themes in modern ecology is the enduring debate on whether there is a relationship between the complexity of a biological community and its stability. In this paper, we focus on the role of detritus and spatial dispersion on the stability of ecosystems. Using Monte Carlo simulations we analyze two three-level models of food webs: a grazing one with the basal species (i.e., primary producers) having unlimited food resources and a detrital one in which the basal species uses detritus as a food resource. While the vast majority of theoretical studies neglects detritus, from our results it follows that the detrital food web is more stable than its grazing counterpart, because the interactions mediated by detritus damp out fluctuations in species' densities. Since the detritus model is the more complex one in terms of interaction patterns, our results provide evidence for the advocates of the complexity as one of the factors enhancing stability of ecosystems.