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Ecology

Stability is woven by complex webs

Nature volume 395, pages 744–745 (1998)Cite this article

Ecological systems are extraordinarily complex. Each of the estimated 10-50 million species on Earth is directly affected by many factors — physical and biological, genetic and environmental, strong and weak, positive and negative, local and distant, current and historical. Add to this the fact that single factors operate jointly in nature, and the number of possible indirect and interactive effects on each species is astronomical. Dealing with such complexity is a central problem in ecology, full of the same contentious issues and rhetoric about reductionistic versus holistic approaches as are debated in other sciences. But on page 794 of this issue, McCann and colleagues1 offer a new and valuable approach to understanding how complexity affects ecological systems.

In 1973, Robert May2 unequivocally showed that, according to his seminal models, ‘complexity’ is not stable — it will eventually cause an ecological system to ‘fall apart’, with strong fluctuations in abundance and the eventual loss of species. However, it was clear to empiricists and some theoreticians that natural systems are quite complex. In any one system, a great diversity of species is connected through many different interactions.

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Figure 1: Food-web complexity, here for islands in the Gulf of California.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, University of California, Davis, 95616, California, USA

    Gary A. Polis

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  1. Gary A. Polis
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Polis, G. Stability is woven by complex webs. Nature 395, 744–745 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/27323

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