A principal aim of ecologists is to identify critical levels of environmental change beyond which ecosystems undergo radical shifts in their functioning. Both food-web theory and alternative stable states theory provide fundamental clues to mechanisms conferring stability to natural systems. Yet, it is unclear how the concept of food-web stability is associated with the resilience of ecosystems susceptible to regime change. Here, we use a combination of food web and ecosystem modelling to show that impending catastrophic shifts in shallow lakes are preceded by a destabilizing reorganization of interaction strengths in the aquatic food web. Analysis of the intricate web of trophic interactions reveals that only few key interactions, involving zooplankton, diatoms and detritus, dictate the deterioration of food-web stability. Our study exposes a tight link between food-web dynamics and the dynamics of the whole ecosystem, implying that trophic organization may serve as an empirical indicator of ecosystem resilience.

Diversity effects on many aspects of ecosystem function have been well documented. However, fire is an exception: fire experiments have mainly included single species, bulk litter, or vegetation, and, as such, the role of diversity as a determinant of flammability, a crucial aspect of ecosystem function, is poorly understood. This study is the first to experimentally test whether flammability characteristics of two-species mixtures are non-additive, i.e., differ from expected flammability based on the component species in monospecific fuel. In standardized fire experiments on ground fuels, including monospecific fuels and mixtures of five contrasting subarctic plant fuel types in a controlled laboratory environment, we measured flame speed, flame duration, and maximum temperature. Broadly half of the mixture combinations showed non-additive effects for these flammability indicators; these were mainly enhanced dominance effects for temporal dynamics – fire speed and duration. Fuel types with the more flammable value for a characteristic determined the rate of fire speed and duration of the whole mixture; in contrast, maximum temperature of the fire was determined by the biomass-weighted mean of the mixture. These results suggest that ecological invasions by highly flammable species may have effects on ground-fire dynamics well out of proportion to their biomass.

How the complexity of food webs relates to stability has been a subject of many studies. Often, unweighted connectance is used to express complexity. Unweighted connectance is measured as the proportion of realized links in the network. Weighted connectance, on the other hand, takes link weights (fluxes or feeding rates) into account and captures the shape of the flux distribution. Here, we used weighted connectance to revisit the relation between complexity and stability. We used 15 real soil food webs and determined the feeding rates and the interaction strength matrices. We calculated both versions of connectance, and related these structural properties to food web stability. We also determined the skewness of both flux and interaction strength distributions with the Gini coefficient. We found no relation between unweighted connectance and food web stability, but weighted connectance was positively correlated with stability. This finding challenges the notion that complexity may constrain stability, and supports the 'complexity begets stability' notion. The positive correlation between weighted connectance and stability implies that the more evenly flux rates were distributed over links, the more stable the webs were. This was confirmed by the Gini coefficients of both fluxes and interaction strengths. However, the most even distributions of this dataset still were strongly skewed towards small fluxes or weak interaction strengths. Thus, incorporating these distribution with many weak links via weighted instead of unweighted food web measures can shed new light on classical theories.

Shallow lakes have the potential to switch between two alternative stable states: a clear macrophyte-dominated and a turbid phytoplankton-dominated state. Observational and experimental studies show that in some lakes herbivory by birds may severely decrease macrophyte biomass, while in other lakes, the removed biomass by herbivory is compensated by regrowth. These contradictory outcomes might arise because of interplay between top-down control by bird herbivory and bottom-up effects by nutrient loading on macrophytes. Here, we use the ecosystem model PCLake to study top-down and bottom-up control of macrophytes by coots and nutrient loading. Our model predicted that (1) herbivory by birds lowers the critical nutrient loading at which the regime shift occurs; (2) bird impact on macrophyte biomass through herbivory increases with nutrient loading; and (3) improved food quality enhances the impact of birds on macrophytes, thus decreasing the resilience of the clear-water state even further. The fact that bird herbivory can have a large impact on macrophyte biomass and can facilitate a regime shift implies that the presence of waterfowl should be taken into account in the estimation of critical nutrient loadings to be used in water quality management.

A common approach to analyse stability of biological communities is to calculate the interaction strength matrix. Problematic in this approach is defining intraspecific interaction strengths, represented by diagonal elements in the matrix, due to a lack of empirical data for these strengths. Theoretical studies have shown that an overall increase in these strengths enhances stability. However, the way in which the pattern in intraspecific interaction strengths, i.e. the variation in these strengths between species, influences stability has received little attention. We constructed interaction strength matrices for 11 real soil food webs in which four patterns for intraspecific interaction strengths were chosen, based on the ecological literature. These patterns included strengths that were (1) similar for all species, (2) trophic level dependent, (3) biomass dependent, or (4) death rate dependent. These four patterns were analysed for their influence on (1) ranking food webs by their stability and (2) the response in stability to variation of single interspecific interaction strengths. The first analysis showed that ranking the 11 food webs by their stability was not strongly influenced by the choice of diagonal pattern. In contrast, the second analysis showed that the response of food web stability to variation in single interspecific interaction strengths was sensitive to the choice of diagonal pattern. Notably, stability could increase using one pattern and decrease using another. This result asks for deliberate approaches to choose diagonal element values in order to make predictions on how particular species, interactions, or other food web parameters affect food web stability.