Diversity begets stability: Sublinear growth and competitive coexistence across ecosystems

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hatton, Ian A.; Mazzarisi, Onofrio; Altieri, Ada; Smerlak, Matteo
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society; McGill University; University of Kansas; Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP); Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Universite Paris Cite; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); CNRS - Institute of Chemistry (INC); Universite PSL; Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI)
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-13861
• DOI: 10.1126/science.adg8488
• 发表日期: 2024-03-15
• 关键词: body-size; population-density; fish production; abundance; DYNAMICS; biodiversity; biomass; prediction; MODEL; LAWS

摘要

The worldwide loss of species diversity brings urgency to understanding how diverse ecosystems maintain stability. Whereas early ecological ideas and classic observations suggested that stability increases with diversity, ecological theory makes the opposite prediction, leading to the long-standing diversity-stability debate. Here, we show that this puzzle can be resolved if growth scales as a sublinear power law with biomass (exponent <1), exhibiting a form of population self-regulation analogous to models of individual ontogeny. We show that competitive interactions among populations with sublinear growth do not lead to exclusion, as occurs with logistic growth, but instead promote stability at higher diversity. Our model realigns theory with classic observations and predicts large-scale macroecological patterns. However, it makes an unsettling prediction: Biodiversity loss may accelerate the destabilization of ecosystems.