Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jeynes‐Smith, Cailan
• Bode, Michael
• Araujo, Robyn P.

Titel

Identifying and explaining resilience in ecological networks

Ist Teil von

• Ecology letters, 2024-08, Vol.27 (8), p.e14484-n/a

Ort / Verlag

England: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

Wiley Online Library - AutoHoldings Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Resilient ecological systems are more likely to persist and function in the Anthropocene. Current methods for estimating an ecosystem's resilience rely on accurately parameterized ecosystem models, which is a significant empirical challenge. In this paper, we adapt tools from biochemical kinetics to identify ecological networks that exhibit ‘structural resilience’, a strong form of resilience that is solely a property of the network structure and is independent of model parameters. We undertake an exhaustive search for structural resilience across all three‐species ecological networks, under a generalized Lotka‐Volterra modelling framework. Out of 20,000 possible network structures, approximately 2% display structural resilience. The properties of these networks provide important insights into the mechanisms that could promote resilience in ecosystems, provide new theoretical avenues for qualitative modelling approaches and provide a foundation for identifying robust forms of ecological resilience in large, realistic ecological networks. Estimating how resilient an ecosystem is to perturbations will provide valuable insight for conservation decision makers and is a priority goal of resilience theory. In this paper, we adapt tools developed for the analysis of biochemical regulatory networks to prove that a strong form of resilience—robust perfect adaptation—is a property of particular ecological networks, and is the result of particular feedback structures. The networks which we identify with this property provide important insights into the potential mechanisms that could promote resilience in ecosystems and suggest new avenues for measuring and understanding the property of ecological resilience in larger, more realistic networks.