Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether stronger trophic coherence suppresses the stable-but-reactive regime and changes where the leading amplifying mode lives in a food web.

Ecological communities can be asymptotically stable yet still strongly amplify perturbations over short times. This experiment asks how that reactive regime changes as predator-prey interaction networks become more trophically coherent, and whether the most amplifying mode localizes on middle trophic layers.

The model sweeps trophic coherence in structured community matrices and compares two effects at once: how fast coherence improves long-run stability, and how fast it shrinks the wedge of systems that are stable but transiently amplifying. Localization diagnostics then test whether the dominant amplifying mode remains concentrated on particular layers or spreads more broadly as coherence rises.

That combination of stability, reactivity, and localization is the point of the experiment. Each ingredient has been studied before, but the project turns them into one controlled comparison of how structure shapes both transient and asymptotic ecological response.

Method: Repeated simulations of structured predator-prey community matrices, sweeping trophic coherence and measuring stability, reactivity, and mode localization.

What is measured: Stable-but-reactive regime width, asymptotic stability indicators, localization of the leading amplifying mode, and trophic-layer dependence.