Quantifying the impact of ecological memory on the dynamics of interacting communities
Fig 6
Memory induces long transient dynamics in a region of the parameter space adjacent to the multistable region.
Bifurcation diagrams for the 3-species Gonze model showing the relative abundances at time 1,000 of the blue, red, and green species as functions of the blue species’ growth rate, for three different initial conditions (leading to three distinct curves per plot), and in the absence (left column) or presence (right column) of memory. The light and dark yellow regions exhibit several alternative states for the same parameter values. However, it can be shown analytically that the system only admits a single stable state in the dark yellow region, whereas it admits multiple stable states in the light yellow region. Therefore, alternative states at time 1,000 in the dark yellow region correspond to instances of long transient dynamics, where the system remains stuck near ghost attractor states. See S4 Fig for illustrations of the dynamics in the dark yellow region.