Knowledge and Skills Statement
Science concepts--interdependence within environmental systems. The student knows that interactions at various levels of organization occur within an ecosystem to maintain stability.
Supporting Information
Research
Gabriel Gellner, Kevin McCann, and Alan Hastings. "Stable Diverse Food Webs Become More Common When Interactions Are More Biologically Constrained." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 31 (2023): e2212061120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2212061120
Summary: Ecologists have long sought to understand how diversity and structure mediate the stability of whole ecosystems. Using recent computationally efficient methodological advances from metabolic networks, we employ for the first time an inverse approach to diversity–stability research. We compare classical random interaction matrices of realistic food web topology (hereafter the classical model) to feasible, biologically constrained, webs produced using the inverse approach.
Research
Thébault, Elisa and Michel Loreau "Trophic Interactions and the Relationship between Species Diversity and Ecosystem Stability."
The American Naturalist 166, no. 4 (2005): E95-E114. https://doi.org/10.1086/444403
Summary: It is important to understand how trophic interactions affect the relationship between biodiversity and the stability of ecosystem processes. Here we present two models to investigate this issue in ecosystems with two trophic levels. Our analysis shows that when diversity affects net species interaction strength, species interactions—both competition among plants and plant‐herbivore interactions—have a strong impact on the relationships between diversity and the temporal variability of total biomass of the various trophic levels.