Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether trophic coherence changes how upper-level versus basal-biased self-regulation controls reactivity and mode localization in food webs.

Ecological self-regulation can be distributed unevenly across trophic levels, and trophic coherence also strongly shapes collective dynamics. This experiment asks whether the benefit of concentrating self-regulation higher in the food web weakens as the web becomes more trophically coherent.

The script compares random food-web ensembles while varying trophic coherence and the trophic-level bias of self-regulation. Its central mechanistic question is whether any change in reactivity is accompanied by a crossover in where the reactive mode localizes, especially onto upper trophic layers.

That makes the project more than a simple stability test. It connects ecological architecture to localization structure, asking whether coherence changes not just how reactive a community is, but which parts of the web dominate that response.

Method: Repeated random food-web simulations varying trophic coherence and trophic-level bias in self-regulation, with ensemble measurements of reactivity and localization.

What is measured: Reactivity, localization of the reactive mode across trophic layers, dependence on self-regulation bias, and coherence-dependent crossover behavior.