ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
Chaos is not rare in natural ecosystems.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Advances in causal discovery methods for ecological time series.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Biotic interactions shape the realized niche of toxic cyanobacteria.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Keystone concept revisited: insights into microbial community dynamics and control.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Temperature variation and life history mediate nonlinearity in fluctuations of marine fish populations worldwide.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Nonlinearity in marine fish populations is amplified by temperature variation and fast life histories.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Quantifying the effects of response diversity dynamics on ecosystem stability.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A practical guide to characterising ecological coexistence.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Catalysts and inhibitors of critical transitions in ecological systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- High-frequency monitoring data reveal substantial variability in the intrinsic predictability of ecosystem dynamics.Ecology · 2026Article
- Learning to learn ecosystems from limited data.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Rigorous validation of ecological models against empirical time series.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Emergence From the Complex Interactions of Epidemics, Droughts, and Floods: Insights From Ming and Qing Dynasties of China During 1470-1911.GeoHealth · 2025Article
- Asymmetric interactions and feast-famine cycles drive chaos in microbial populations.Research square · 2025Article
- The Equilibrium Conundrum.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Plankton Communities Behave Chaotically Under Seasonal or Stochastic Temperature Forcings.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- From genes to patterns: five key dynamical systems concepts to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2025Review
- Spatio-temporal pattern formation of living organisms at the edge of chaos.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Distinct phytoplankton size classes respond differently to biotic and abiotic factors.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- From resonance to chaos by modulating spatiotemporal patterns through a synthetic optogenetic oscillator.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Chaotic dynamics are thought to be rare in natural populations but this may be due to methodological and data limitations, rather than the inherent stability of ecosystems. Following extensive simulation testing, we applied multiple chaos detection methods to a global database of 172 population time series and found evidence for chaos in >30%. In contrast, fitting traditional one-dimensional models identified <10% as chaotic. Chaos was most prevalent among plankton and insects and least among birds and mammals. Lyapunov exponents declined with generation time and scaled as the -1/6 power of body mass among chaotic populations. These results demonstrate that chaos is not rare in natural populations, indicating that there may be intrinsic limits to ecological forecasting and cautioning against the use of steady-state approaches to conservation and management.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.