Food web stability and weighted connectance: the complexity-stability debate revisited
Food web stability and weighted connectance: the complexity-stability debate revisited
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食物网稳定性和加权连接：重新审视复杂性与稳定性的争论
DOI：
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发表时间：
2016
影响因子：
1.6
通讯作者：
P. C. Ruiter
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
C. Altena;L. Hemerik;P. C. Ruiter
食物网的复杂性与稳定性之间的关系一直是许多研究的主题。通常，未加权的连接用于表达复杂性。未加权连接以网络中已实现链路的比例来衡量。另一方面，加权连接考虑链路权重（通量或馈送速率）并捕获通量分布的形状。在这里，我们使用加权连接来重新审视复杂性和稳定性之间的关系。我们使用了 15 个真实的土壤食物网并确定了进食率和相互作用强度矩阵。我们计算了两个版本的连接，并将这些结构特性与食物网稳定性联系起来。我们还用基尼系数确定了通量和相互作用强度分布的偏度。我们发现未加权连接与食物网稳定性之间没有关系，但加权连接与稳定性呈正相关。这一发现挑战了复杂性可能限制稳定性的观点，并支持了“复杂性产生稳定性”的观点。加权连接和稳定性之间的正相关性意味着链接上的通量率分布越均匀，网络就越稳定。通量和相互作用强度的基尼系数证实了这一点。然而，该数据集的最均匀分布仍然严重偏向小通量或弱相互作用强度。因此，通过加权而不是未加权的食物网测量将这些分布与许多薄弱环节结合起来可以为经典理论提供新的启示。
How the complexity of food webs relates to stability has been a subject of many studies. Often, unweighted connectance is used to express complexity. Unweighted connectance is measured as the proportion of realized links in the network. Weighted connectance, on the other hand, takes link weights (fluxes or feeding rates) into account and captures the shape of the flux distribution. Here, we used weighted connectance to revisit the relation between complexity and stability. We used 15 real soil food webs and determined the feeding rates and the interaction strength matrices. We calculated both versions of connectance, and related these structural properties to food web stability. We also determined the skewness of both flux and interaction strength distributions with the Gini coefficient. We found no relation between unweighted connectance and food web stability, but weighted connectance was positively correlated with stability. This finding challenges the notion that complexity may constrain stability, and supports the ‘complexity begets stability’ notion. The positive correlation between weighted connectance and stability implies that the more evenly flux rates were distributed over links, the more stable the webs were. This was confirmed by the Gini coefficients of both fluxes and interaction strengths. However, the most even distributions of this dataset still were strongly skewed towards small fluxes or weak interaction strengths. Thus, incorporating these distribution with many weak links via weighted instead of unweighted food web measures can shed new light on classical theories.