Category: Ecology

Summary: Finding the recycling-buffer strength needed to restabilize trophically coherent consumer-resource communities under elemental mismatch.

Ecological communities are shaped by both who eats whom and how nutrients are recycled back into the system. This experiment asks whether recycling can rescue a community matrix that has already been destabilized by stoichiometric mismatch, and if so, how much recycling-buffer strength is required.

The model builds random trophically coherent consumer-resource Jacobians, fixes the mismatch in an unstable regime, and then bisects the recycling-buffer parameter until the leading eigenvalue indicates recovery of stability. Iterative deepening repeats the threshold search at larger system sizes so the result is a finite-size rescue map rather than a single simulation point.

That matters because nutrient recycling, stoichiometric stress, and trophic coherence are often studied separately. Here they are combined into one spectral threshold problem that can reveal how local recycling feedbacks restore stability in structured food webs.

Method: Dense non-symmetric Jacobian eigensolve with iterative deepening and bisection on recycling-buffer strength.

What is measured: Critical recycling-buffer threshold, leading eigenvalue real part, midlayer localization score, fixed mismatch level, and bracket width.