# Far-ranging generalist top predators enhance the stability of meta-foodwebs

## TL;DR

This study demonstrates that far-ranging generalist top predators significantly enhance the stability of complex meta-foodwebs, emphasizing their crucial role in ecosystem conservation and stability.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis showing that far-ranging top predators increase stability in large, realistic meta-foodwebs using generalized modeling and stability functions.

## Key findings

- Meta-foodwebs with far-ranging predators are more stable.
- Adding far-ranging predators stabilizes large foodwebs.
- Far-ranging predators have a net stabilizing effect despite increasing web size.

## Abstract

Identifying stabilizing factors in foodwebs is a long standing challenge with wide implications for community ecology and conservation. Here, we investigate the stability of spatially resolved meta-foodwebs with far-ranging super-predators for whom the whole meta-foodwebs appears to be a single habitat. By using a combination of generalised modeling with a master stability function approach, we are able to efficiently explore the asymptotic stability of large classes of realistic many-patch meta-foodwebs. We show that meta-foodwebs with far-ranging top predators are more stable than those with localized top predators. Moreover, adding far-ranging generalist top predators to a system can have a net stabilizing effect, despite increasing the food web size. These results highlight the importance of top predator conservation.