The Paradox of Enrichment in Metaecosystems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paradox of enrichment has been studied almost exclusively within communities or metacommunities, without explicit nutrient dynamics. Yet local recycling of materials from enriched ecosystems may affect the stability of connected ecosystems. Here we study the effect of nutrient, detritus, producer, and consumer spatial flows-combined with changes in regional enrichment-on the stability of a metaecosystem model. We considered both spatially homogeneous and heterogeneous enrichment. We found that nutrient and detritus spatial flows are destabilizing, whereas producer or consumer spatial flows are either neutral or stabilizing. We noticed that detritus spatial flows have only a weak impact on stability. Our study reveals that heterogeneity no longer stabilizes well-connected systems when accounting for explicit representation of nutrient dynamics. We also found that intermediate consumer diffusion could lead to multiple equilibria in strongly enriched metaecosystems. Stability can emerge from a top-down control allowing the storage of materials into inorganic form, a mechanism never documented before. In conclusion, local enrichment can be stabilized if spatial flows are strong enough to efficiently redistribute the local excess of enrichment to unfertile ecosystems. However, high regional enrichment can be dampened only by intermediate consumer diffusion rates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".