Category: Ecology

Summary: Finding how strongly recycled nutrients must be routed one trophic level downward to restabilize a stoichiometrically mismatched consumer-resource community.

Nutrient recycling can buffer ecological communities, but that buffer may depend on where recycled material actually goes. This experiment asks whether a trophically coherent consumer-resource system destabilized by stoichiometric mismatch can recover only when recycling is directed mainly one step downward through the trophic hierarchy rather than spread diffusely across many lower layers.

The model constructs dense non-normal Jacobians for random communities with mismatch held fixed, then uses GPU-based dominant-mode extraction and iterative deepening to narrow the directionality threshold for renewed stability. Because the threshold bracket is carried to larger system sizes, the output is a finite-size map rather than a single small-system example.

That distinction matters because total recycling strength and recycling architecture are often discussed together. Here the quantity of recycling is not the main question; the experiment isolates whether directional routing is itself a stabilizing ecological mechanism.

Method: GPU dominant-mode extraction on dense consumer-resource Jacobians with iterative deepening and bisection on one-step-down recycling directionality.

What is measured: Critical recycling-directionality threshold, leading-mode stability boundary, restabilization status, system size reached, and bracket width.