"Exploring ecosystem dynamics in a changing world; complexity and stability revisited"Lazzari, Paolo, and Mitra, AditeeMini-symposium organisers: Paolo Lazzari (plazzari@ogs.it) and Aditee Mitra (mitraa2@cardiff.ac.uk) Abstract: The dramatic loss of species diversity brings urgency to understanding how diverse ecosystems are naturally stabilized. Whereas conventional wisdom and observation suggest that stability increases with diversity, ecological theory has long made the opposite prediction, leading to the longstanding “diversity-stability debate”. Many theoretical and mathematical results have been obtained using very simplified models such as the generalised Lotka-Volterra models, which can be solved or deeply investigated using elegant mathematical techniques. However, the current trend in modelling is to increase the complexity of ecosystem models to include important physiological processes, complex trophic web interactions and the description of organism traits. This increase in realism is driven by the increasing amount of data available to constrain the models and is urgently needed as these models need to be applied in the context of operational oceanography and climate projections. In this session, we will focus on how results can be extrapolated from simplified theoretical to complex models to understand ecosystem dynamics aiming at a more realistic representation of reality. The presentations in this session will therefore provide an insight into the applications of models used in theoretical ecology to study the relationship between stability and biodiversity (Mazzarisi), to explore complex evolutionary dynamics (Flynn), to investigate multifaceted trophic strategies (Mitra) and to examine the stochastic description of biogeochemical processes within complex models (Lazzari). |
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