Figure 5.
The effects of meta-ecosystem network structure on autotroph and herbivore productivity where the total number of links between ecosystems are equal, nutrient movement (dR) is used to perturb the meta-ecosystem with no autotroph movement (dA = 0; (a,b)) and with relatively high autotroph movement (dA = 0.045; (c,d)). In all cases, the average of 10 simulations was used to reduce the effects of time-series truncation on the overall results. Both (a) autotroph and (b) herbivore productivity increase with increasing nutrient movement with no autotroph movement, though the differences between networks are large. When autotroph movement is high, (c) autotroph and (d) herbivore productivity still increase with increasing nutrient movement, but the relative rankings of the networks is drastically different.