Category: Ecology

Summary: Finding how selectively recycled nutrients must be routed toward stoichiometrically matched consumers to restabilize a trophically coherent food-web community under fixed mismatch.

Ecological communities are shaped not just by who consumes whom, but also by how nutrients are recycled back into the web. This experiment asks whether recycling can rescue a consumer-resource community that has already been destabilized by stoichiometric mismatch, and specifically whether that rescue requires nutrients to be routed preferentially toward better-matched consumers rather than spread indiscriminately.

The script builds dense non-symmetric Jacobians for trophically coherent consumer-resource systems, fixes the mismatch and overall recycling buffer in a stressed regime, and then bisects a selectivity parameter across increasing system sizes. Stability is read from the leading eigenvalue, so the output is a finite-size threshold map for when selective recycling becomes strong enough to restore stability.

That matters because nutrient recycling is often treated as beneficial in aggregate, while the architecture of that recycling is discussed less directly. Here the experiment isolates selectivity itself as the key control parameter and asks how precisely recycling must target the right parts of the community to work as a stabilizing mechanism.

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

What is measured: Critical selectivity threshold, leading-eigenvalue stability boundary, stability fraction across disorder samples, and bracket width.