title: Synchrony in tritrophic food chain metacommunities.
abstract: The synchronous behaviour of interacting communities is studied in this paper. Each community is described by a tritrophic food chain model, and the communities interact through a network with arbitrary topology, composed of patches and migration corridors. The analysis of the local synchronization properties (via the master stability function approach) shows that, if only one species can migrate, the dispersal of the consumer (i.e., the intermediate trophic level) is the most effective mechanism for promoting synchronization. When analysing the effects of the variations of demographic parameters, it is found that factors that stabilize the single community also tend to favour synchronization. Global synchronization is finally analysed by means of the connection graph method, yielding a lower bound on the value of the dispersion rate that guarantees the synchronization of the metacommunity for a given network topology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
authors.forename: Igor
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Belykh
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Piccardi
authors.forename: Sergio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rinaldi
mesh_terms: D020387:Food Chain; D008962:Models, Theoretical