Chaotic dynamics in a multispecies community

It is shown that community dynamics is neither haphazard nor completely directed. This is quite clear from our examination of a concrete example where recovery dynamics in vegetation progressed from an early phase of strong linear determinism to intense randomness with phase transition defined by density. Is it possible to reconstruct the two phase structure in simple mathematical terms? The results show that it is, and that the model is very simple: a discrete-time Markov chain with white noise. Interestingly, the long-term behaviour of the model is complex chaotic and explosive, suggesting that progression from dominant randomness to determinism is a distinctly probable event. And thus a conceptual foundation is laid, through interlinking initial condition, phase structure and explosive chaoticity, for a unifying theory, in which the classical hypotheses of community dynamics appear as special cases.