Complexity Increases Predictability in Allometrically Constrained Food Webs

Citeable URL: https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/articles/vd66w557s

Descriptions

Attribute Name	Values
Creator	Iles, Alison C. Novak, Mark
Abstract	All ecosystems are subjected to chronic disturbances, such as harvest, pollution, and climate change. The capacity to forecast how species respond to such press perturbations is limited by our imprecise knowledge of pairwise species interaction strengths and the many direct and indirect pathways along which perturbations can propagate between species. Network complexity (size and connectance) has thereby been seen to limit the predictability of ecological systems. Here we demonstrate a counteracting mechanism in which the influence of indirect effects declines with increasing network complexity when species interactions are governed by universal allometric constraints. With these constraints, network size and connectance interact to produce a skewed distribution of interaction strengths whose skew becomes more pronounced with increasing complexity. Together, the increased prevalence of weak interactions and the increased relative strength and rarity of strong interactions in complex networks limit disturbance propagation and preserve the qualitative predictability of net effects even when pairwise interaction strengths exhibit substantial variation or uncertainty.
Contributor	Novak, Mark
License	Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
Resource Type	Article
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1086/686730
Date Issued	2016-07
Journal Title	American Naturalist
Journal Volume	188
Rights Statement	In Copyright
Language	English [eng]
ISSN	0003-0147