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Schlagwörter:
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Zusammenfassung:
Stability and persistence of populations is of great interest for management and conservation
purposes. Spatial dynamics can have a crucial role in population stability via synchronization,
and beneficial and detrimental effects on population persistence have been shown. Despite a
theoretical understanding of synchronization, empirical data on synchrony of populations are
restricted to systems that do not display the full spectrum of complex dynamics that may
occur in nature (that is, chaos or quasiperiodicity). Here we show in experiments that the
qualitative form of dynamic behaviour of chaotic and periodic oscillating communities did not
change when unidirectionally coupled to oscillating driver communities. Driver and response
populations were phase locked in cyclic communities, whereas chaotic communities showed
only short periods of statistical coherencies. Our study provides the first empirical analysis of
synchronization of chaotic communities and shows that the likelihood for chaos is not lowered
in spatially explicit systems but that cyclic and chaotic systems differ in synchronization.
