Stabilization of macroscopic dynamics by fine-grained disorder in many-species ecosystems

Models for complex, heterogeneous systems such as ecological communities vary in the level of organization they describe. When the dynamics at the species level is unknown, one typically resorts to heuristic "macroscopic" models that capture relationships among a few degrees of freedom, e.g., groups of similar species, and commonly display out-of-equilibrium dynamics. These models, however, exactly reflect the species-level "microscopic" dynamics only when microscopic heterogeneity can be neglected. Here, we address the robustness of such macroscopic descriptions to the addition of disordered microscopic interactions. While disorder is known to destabilize equilibria at the microscopic level, leading to asynchronous (typically chaotic) fluctuations, we show that it can also stabilize synchronous species fluctuations driven by macroscopic structure. We analytically find the conditions for the existence of heterogeneity-stabilized equilibria and relate their stability to a mismatch in the time scales of individual species. This may shed light on the empirical observation that many-species ecosystems often appear stable despite highly diverse and potentially destabilizing interactions between species and functional groups.