Since the work of Robert May in 1972, the local asymptotic stability of large ecological
systems has been a focus of theoretical ecology. Here we review May's work in the light of …

Most research on the effects of environmental change in freshwaters has focused on
incremental changes in average conditions, rather than fluctuations or extreme events such …

The worldwide loss of species diversity brings urgency to understanding how diverse
ecosystems maintain stability. Whereas early ecological ideas and classic observations …

Classical theory shows that large communities are destabilized by random interactions
among species pairs, creating an upper bound on ecosystem diversity. However, species …

Networks composed of distinct, densely connected subsystems are called modular. In
ecology, it has been posited that a modular organization of species interactions would …

Current approaches to conservation may be inadequate to maintain ecosystem integrity
because they are mostly based on rarity status of organisms rather than functional …

Ecological theory suggests that large-scale patterns such as community stability can be
influenced by changes in interspecific interactions that arise from the behavioural and/or …

What drives the stability, or instability, of complex ecosystems? This question sits at the heart
of community ecology and has motivated a large body of theoretical work exploring how …

Microbial species rarely exist in isolation. In naturally occurring microbial systems there is
strong evidence for a positive relationship between species diversity and productivity of …

Understanding the mechanisms responsible for stability and persistence of ecosystems is
one of the greatest challenges in ecology. Robert May showed that, contrary to intuition …