TAILIEUCHUNG - Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems

What makes populations stabilize? What makes them fluctuate? Are populations in complex ecosystems more stable than populations in simple ecosystems? In 1973, Robert May addressed these questions in this classic book. May investigated the mathematical roots of population dynamics and argued-counter to most current biological thinking-that complex ecosystems in themselves do not lead to population stability. Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems played a key role in introducing nonlinear mathematical models and the study of deterministic chaos into ecology, a role chronicled in James Gleick's book Chaos. In the quarter century since its first publication, the book's message has grown. | r R I N c T o N LANDMARKS IN BIOLOGY STABILITY AND COMPLEXITY IN M o D E L ECOSYSTEMS WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR ROBERT M. MAY Contents Preface V 1. Introduction 3 2. Mathematical Models and Stability 13 3. Stability versus Complexity in Multispecies Models 37 4. Models with Few Species Limit Cycles and Time Delays 79 5. Randomly Fluctuating Environments 109 6. Niche Overlap and Limiting Similarity 139 7. Speculations 172 Appendices Bibliography Author Index Subject Index 187 211 229 233 CHAPTER ONE Introduction This book contains four loosely connected main themes which are developed one by one in Chapters 3 4 5 and 6 1. Chapter 3 draws together various lines of argument to suggest that in general mathematical models of multispecies communities increasing complexity tends to beget diminished stability. In pursuit of this generalization we consider the stability character first of a particular class of multispecies predator-prey models being rather dismissive of certain recent models with very special symmetry properties second of large complex ecosystem models in which the trophic web links are assembled at random and third of models in which we know only the topological structure of the trophic web that is only the signs of the interactions between the various species. This third kind of approach is conventionally called qualitative stability theory. A miscellany of other arguments are also touched upon. Roughly speaking we here take complexity to be measured by the number and nature of the individual links in the food web and stability by the tendency for population perturbations to damp out returning the system to some persistent configuration. These results caution against any simple belief that increasing population stability is an automatic r consequence of increasing multispecies complexity. I hat stability may usually go with complexity in the natural world but not usually in general mathematical models is not really paradoxical. In nature we .

• Sinh học
• complex ecosystems
• simple ecosystems
• author addresses
• population stability
• Stability and Complexity
• swept biology
• Reflexing Interfaces
• Paradox Revealed
• Cooperative Coevolution
• Evolutionary Algorithms
• Machine Learning
• Biotic Complexity
• BMC Bioinformatics
• Metabolic network
• Reverse ecology
• Traditional ecological methods