The resilience and resistance of an ecosystem to a collapse of diversity.

Diversity is expected to increase the resilience of ecosystems. Nevertheless, highly diverse ecosystems have collapsed, as did Lake Victoria's ecosystem of cichlids or Caribbean coral reefs. We try to gain insight to this paradox, by analyzing a simple model of a diverse community where each co...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Andrea S Downing, Egbert H van Nes, Wolf M Mooij, Marten Scheffer
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2012-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3459835?pdf=render