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Topological characterization of ecological dynamics via persistent homology
AIMS Mathematics 2026, 11(6): 18122-18147
Published: 15 June 2026
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Conventional linear methods provide valuable insights into ecological population dynamics but may not fully capture their underlying geometric complexity. We present a large-scale topological characterization of ecological population dynamics using persistent homology applied to 500 time series from the BioTIME database, spanning marine, terrestrial, and freshwater ecosystems. Time-delay embedding and Vietoris–Rips filtration yield two classes of topological invariants: Betti numbers β k , which count persistent topological features, and persistence entropy H k , which quantifies their distributional complexity. These invariants quantify multiscale cyclic organization in a manner that complements spectral and autoregressive approaches. Three principal components capture 92.6 % of topological variance, revealing that ecological attractor geometry is fundamentally low-dimensional. Realm membership explains less than 0.01 % of this variance, demonstrating that habitat type imposes negligible constraints on dynamical complexity relative to within-realm heterogeneity, a finding that challenges the widely assumed structuring role of environmental context. An exceptionally strong coupling ( ρ = 0.989) between β k and H k reflects an information-theoretic bound H k log 2 ( β k ). These results support shared dynamical mechanisms, including density dependence, predator-prey interactions, and life history trade-offs, as primary determinants of attractor topology, and they establish persistent homology as a noise-robust complement to conventional methods for comparative ecological analysis.

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