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2507379 
Journal Article 
Complexity and stability revisited 
Jansen, VAA; Kokkoris, GD 
2003 
Yes 
Ecology Letters
ISSN: 1461-023X
EISSN: 1461-0248 
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING LTD 
OXFORD 
6 
6 
498-502 
WOS:000182777000003 
Since Robert May's work on random community matrices it has been known that stability tends to decrease with complexity. Recently, it was shown that this is not necessarily true in competitive ecosystems. We investigated the stability of random ecosystems and found that it can largely be predicted by simple matrix statistics such as the mean and the variance of the interaction coefficients. We use this to explain why stability can increase as well as decrease with complexity in ecological communities. We argue that the variance, and to a lesser extent the mean, of the interaction coefficients go a long way in explaining patterns in the stability of ecosystems. 
assembly; community ecology; community matrix; complexity; ecosystems; interaction matrix; Lotka-Volterra model; random matrix