Pairwise interactions & community stability

Understanding community stability against episodic changes, as well as how stability is impacted by more gradual changes, is a pressing need. In this project we want to evaluate our capacity to predict stability, as well as the effects of important global change drivers thereon, from simple community models. To this end, we will parameterize community models with pairwise interactions and compare our predictions of stability against small and large perturbations of species densities, and this under various scenarios of two environmental changes (heat and pollution). We will combine experiments with a unique cyanobacteria system, mathematical modelling, and novel theory based on hypergraph theory.