ArticleNature ecology & evolution2023
Time delays modulate the stability of complex ecosystems.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Metabolic feedbacks drive population dynamics and can lead to oscillations among leaf bacteria.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Low initial metabolite production enhances stability in syntrophic bacterial consortia.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Linking Biotic Interactions to Species Stability.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Catalysts and inhibitors of critical transitions in ecological systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Experimentally enhancing dispersal reveals the outsized importance of transient dynamics in a fluctuating environment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Impacts of biodiversity-dependent ecosystem service debts on the safe operating space of social-ecological systems: a theoretical modelling study.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Stochastic models allow improved inference of microbiome interactions from time series data.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Stability of Ecological Systems: A Theoretical Review.Physics reports · 2024Article
- Networked dynamic systems with higher-order interactions: stability versus complexity.National science review · 2024Article
- Microbial diversity and ecological complexity emerging from environmental variation and horizontal gene transfer in a simple mathematical model.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Use of zebrafish to identify host responses specific to type VI secretion system mediated interbacterial antagonism.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- The MTIST platform: a microbiome time series inference standardized test.Research square · 2024Article
- Reactivity of complex communities can be more important than stability.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
What drives the stability, or instability, of complex ecosystems? This question sits at the heart of community ecology and has motivated a large body of theoretical work exploring how community properties shape ecosystem dynamics. However, the overwhelming majority of current theory assumes that species interactions are instantaneous, meaning that changes in the abundance of one species will lead to immediate changes in the abundances of its partners. In practice, time delays in how species respond to one another are widespread across ecological contexts, yet the impact of these delays on ecosystems remains unclear. Here we derive a new body of theory to comprehensively study the impact of time delays on ecological stability. We find that time delays are important for ecosystem stability. Large delays are typically destabilizing but, surprisingly, short delays can substantially increase community stability. Moreover, in stark contrast to delay-free systems, delays dictate that communities with more abundant species can be less stable than ones with less abundant species. Finally, we show that delays fundamentally shift how species interactions impact ecosystem stability, with communities of mixed interaction types becoming the most stable class of ecosystem. Our work demonstrates that time delays can be critical for the stability of complex ecosystems.
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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.