Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether greater trophic coherence suppresses the reactive regime while concentrating transient amplification onto middle trophic layers.

Trophic coherence is often associated with ecological stability, but transient amplification can remain important even when long-run stability improves. This experiment asks whether increasing coherence shrinks the stable-but-reactive wedge faster than it improves asymptotic stability, and whether the most amplified mode becomes localized on particular trophic layers.

The GPU study measures both spectral stability and reactivity while tracking where the leading amplifying mode sits in the food-web hierarchy. That makes it possible to ask whether coherence reduces overall risk or merely channels transient growth into a narrower part of the network.

The distinction matters because ecosystems can experience damaging excursions without becoming asymptotically unstable. The experiment therefore targets how trophic organization reshapes both the size and the location of transient instability.

Method: GPU batched food-web spectral analysis sweeping trophic coherence while measuring reactivity, asymptotic stability, and eigenvector localization by trophic layer.

What is measured: Stable-but-reactive wedge width, asymptotic stability margin, localization of the amplifying mode, trophic-layer dependence, and coherence effects.