Food web complexity enhances community stability and climate regulation ina geophysiological model

A central debate in community ecology concerns the relationship between the complexity of communities and their stability. How does the richness of fo od web structures affect their resistance and resilience to perturbation? M ost mathematical models of communities have shown that stability declines a s complexity increases but so far, modellers have not included the material environment in their calculations. Here an otherwise conventional communit y ecology model is described, which includes feedback between the biota and their climate. This "geophysiological" model is stable in the sense that i t resists perturbation. The more complex the community included in the mode l, the greater its stability in terms of both resistance to perturbation an d rate of response to perturbation. This is a realistic way to model the na tural world because organisms cannot avoid feedback to and from their mater ial environment.