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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Kieran Peel, Professor Darren Evans, Dr Clive Emary
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
The complex network of interactions between species makesunderstanding the response of ecosystems to disturbances anenduring challenge. One commonplace way to deal with thiscomplexity is to reduce the description of a species to a binarypresence–absence variable. Though convenient, this limits thepatterns of behaviours representable within such models. Weaddress these shortcomings by considering discrete populationmodels that expand species descriptions beyond the binarysetting. Specifically, we focus on ternary (three-state) modelswhich, alongside presence and absence, additionally permitspecies to become overabundant. We apply this ternaryframework to the robustness analysis of model ecosystems andshow that this expanded description permits the modelling oftop-down extinction cascades emerging from consumerpressure or mesopredator release. Results therefore differsignificantly from those seen in binary models, where sucheffects are absent. We also illustrate how this method opens upthe modelling of ecosystem disturbances outside the scope ofbinary models, namely those in which species are externallyraised to overabundance. Our method therefore has thepotential to provide a richer description of ecosystem dynamicsand their disturbances, while at the same time preserving theconceptual simplicity of familiar binary approaches.
Author(s): Peel K, Evans DM, Emary C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Royal Society Open Science
Year: 2022
Volume: 9
Issue: 10
Print publication date: 26/10/2022
Online publication date: 26/10/2022
Acceptance date: 30/09/2022
Date deposited: 31/10/2022
ISSN (electronic): 2054-5703
Publisher: The Royal Society Publishing
URL: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220619
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.220619
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