PLoS Comput Biol plos ploscomp PLoS Computational Biology 1553-7358 Public Library of Science San Francisco, USA 10.1371/image.pcbi.v21.i05 Issue Image Biology and life sciencesEcologyEcosystems Ecology and environmental sciencesEcologyEcosystems Computer and information sciencesSystems scienceSystem stability Physical sciencesMathematicsSystems scienceSystem stability Physical sciencesMathematicsStatisticsStatistical theories Biology and life sciencesEcologyBiodiversity Ecology and environmental sciencesEcologyBiodiversity PLoS Computational Biology Issue Image | Vol. 21(5) June 2025 Issue Image 6 2025 10 6 2025 21 5 ev21.i05 2025 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <bold>Computational complexity in a random ecosystem</bold>

Ecosystems consist of diverse mixtures of cooperating and competing species, which cause these systems to take a long time to reach stable equilibrium states. Here, we borrow tools from computational complexity theory to frame complex ecosystems as optimization problems, and we derive scaling laws for the time that it takes ecosystems to equilibrate. This image shows transient chaos in a model ecosystem, in which the equilibration time strongly varies as the initial species densities change. Gilpin et al. 2025

Image Credit: William Gilpin

 <fig id="image-pcbi-v21-i05-g001"> <object-id pub-id-type="doi">10.1371/image.pcbi.v21.i05.g001</object-id> <caption> <title><bold>Computational complexity in a random ecosystem</bold>

Ecosystems consist of diverse mixtures of cooperating and competing species, which cause these systems to take a long time to reach stable equilibrium states. Here, we borrow tools from computational complexity theory to frame complex ecosystems as optimization problems, and we derive scaling laws for the time that it takes ecosystems to equilibrate. This image shows transient chaos in a model ecosystem, in which the equilibration time strongly varies as the initial species densities change. Gilpin et al. 2025

Image Credit: William Gilpin

2025 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.