biome · stability lab — will this web survive?

The box-model dashboard (and the lake bioengine) show what happens over 600 days. You can also design your own web and read it here, or ask whether intermingling the land & lake webs makes them more robust. This reads the fate of the steady state straight from its linearization — the community matrix (how each species' growth responds to every species' biomass at equilibrium). Its eigenvalues decide stability (May 1972); its symmetric part decides reactivity (Neubert & Caswell 1997); its inverse ranks keystones (Bender 1984). No 600-day run — the verdict is analytic. How it works ↗

Community

Drag a knob and the eigenvalues move. Push self-limitation to 0 and watch the rightmost eigenvalue cross into the unstable half-plane — a Hopf bifurcation, the predator–prey loop breaking into oscillation.

Eigenvalue spectrum (per day)

Each dot is an eigenvalue of the community matrix on the complex plane. Left of the dashed line is stable (perturbations decay); the rightmost dot is the verdict. Height = oscillation frequency (predator–prey ringing).

Community matrix — ∂(growthᵢ)/∂(biomassⱼ)

green = + (j helps i), red = − (j harms i). The diagonal is self-regulation; the predator row/column shows top-down control.

Keystones — who moves the web when pressed (normalised)

From −J⁻¹: a sustained nudge to a species shifts the whole equilibrium by its column. Long bar ⇒ pressing it ripples far (Bender press perturbation).