Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether upper-trophic self-regulation suppresses transient amplification better than basal-biased damping, and when that advantage fades as trophic coherence increases.

Ecological communities can be linearly stable yet still show large transient amplification after perturbations. This experiment asks whether directing stronger self-regulation toward upper trophic levels reduces that reactive amplification more effectively than basal-biased damping, and whether the advantage depends on how trophically coherent the food web is.

The simulation uses batched GPU ensembles of community matrices and compares reactivity and mode localization across a two-parameter plane: trophic coherence and trophic-level-biased self-regulation. The central question is a crossover one, not a simple monotone threshold, because coherence can also change where the dominant reactive mode lives in the network.

That makes the experiment about architecture, not just average damping strength. It tests whether self-regulation is most useful when it is placed on the trophic layers that naturally carry the most dangerous transient response.

Method: Batched GPU community-matrix calculations comparing reactivity and localization across trophic coherence and self-regulation bias conditions.

What is measured: Reactive amplification, localization of the dominant reactive mode, trophic-coherence dependence, and crossover between damping strategies.