Complex interactions can create persistent fluctuations in high-diversity ecosystems
Fig 4
Sources maintain their identity over time.
The degree to which a patch is a source for a given species is measured by (dN/dt)diff, the contribution of diffusion to the change of N(t), which is negative for sources and positive for sinks. We show all species-patch pairs ordered by the average of this quantity over long times, with error bars giving its standard deviation. For 94% of sources, and 85% of all species-patch pairs, this quantity (dN/dt)diff retains its sign most of the time, being at least one standard deviation away from zero.