Feasibility and Resilience in Randomly Assembled Communities

As our world faces ever-increasing pressure upon many natural environments, it is essential to understand the stability of ecological communities. One of the crucial aspects of stability in rich communities is resilience, which entails information on how quickly the community can recover from small fluctuations in the densities of the populations. Equally relevant is their feasibility, which is indicative of how likely all the populations in the community can coexist, on the assumption that relative growth rates are variable. Despite substantial advancements in the investigation of these measures of stability, their interplay remains largely unexplored. In this work, we performed a comprehensive ecologically-informed exploration of the parameter space of the generalized Lotka-Volterra model integrating variability in type, intensity, and distribution of interspecific ecological interactions to study the broad patterns linking these two aspects of stability. We found a positive correlation between resilience and feasibility, suggesting that more resilient communities are more likely to be feasible. Additionally, we also found that communities with lower densities and intensities of interactions and more competition/exploitation are more resilient, and communities with equal proportions of positive and negative interactions are more feasible. Our study highlights the importance of investigations integrating different aspects of ecological stability.