Improved stability indicators for empirical food webs

Abstract

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. After a short review of the contemporary stability indicators recently used to assess behavior of the empirical food webs, we discuss the corresponding amplification and timescales of transient instability. Then, a novel robust measure that incorporates uncertainty level of empirical data and amplification-timescale frame in the stability analysis is introduced. As a result, more realistic notion of stability is achieved, and its usefulness is advocated. Finally, an efficient numerical algorithm for its computation is constructed to allow possible applications to high resolution food webs in the future. New stability indicator is computed for the soil food web and it is compared with the ones reported in the literature.