Riley Kouns

Major: Mathematics, Statistics

Faculty Advisor: Benjamin Ridenhour

Project Title:

Relating diversity and stability in ecological dynamic models

Abstract

In mathematical ecology, the diversity of a community is often heuristically associated with its ability to avoid extinction or to remain stable against perturbations. We set out to empirically verify the latter property by taking random draws of parameters for two types of dynamic system, those being a generalized Lotka-Volterra (gLV) model and a microbial resource-competition (O’Dwyer) model. Results were summarized in scatterplots of four stability measures against various diversity indices. After repeating this process for systems with 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, and 20 species, the only apparent trend was an at-most minimal correlation between stability and diversity measures, with notable heteroskedasticity in the gLV systems that had few species.

Funding: N/A