Our planet is changing at paces never observed before. Species extinction is happening at
faster rates than ever, greatly exceeding the five mass extinctions in the fossil record …

The simplest theories often have much merit and many limitations, and, in this vein, the
value of neutral theory (NT) of biodiversity has been the subject of much debate over the …

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

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 …

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

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 …

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

Understanding stability—whether a community will eventually return to its original state after
a perturbation—is a major focus in the study of various complex systems, particularly …

The role of species interactions in controlling the interplay between the stability of
ecosystems and their biodiversity is still not well understood. The ability of ecological …

Rich ecosystems harbour thousands of species interacting in tangled networks
encompassing predation, mutualism and competition. Such widespread biodiversity is …