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Chaos is not rare in natural ecosystems | Nature Ecology & Evolution

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Previous meta-analyses have found that few ecological time series are actually chaotic; here, the authors use recently developed chaos detection methods and a larger number of time series to show that 30% of studied time series are characterized as chaotic.

Subjects Ecological modelling Population dynamics Abstract Chaotic dynamics are thought to be rare in natural populations but this may be due to methodological and data limitations, rather than the inherent stability of ecosystems. Following extensive simulation testing, we applied multiple chaos detection methods to a global database of 172 population time series and found evidence for chaos in >30%. In contrast, fitting traditional one-dimensional models identified <10% as chaotic. Chaos was most prevalent among plankton and insects and least among birds and mammals. Lyapunov exponents decli

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