Community response to enrichment is highly sensitive to model structure

Abstract

Biologists use mathematical functions to model, understand and predict nature. For most biological processes, however, the exact analytical form is not known. This is also true for one of the most basic life processes: the uptake of food or resources. We show that the use of several nearly indistinguishable functions, which can serve as phenomenological descriptors of resource uptake, may lead to alarmingly different dynamical behaviour in a simple community model. More specifically, we demonstrate that the degree of resource enrichment needed to destabilize the community dynamics depends critically on the mathematical nature of the uptake function.