Data from: Will a small randomly-assembled community be feasible and stable?

How likely is that few species can randomly assemble into a feasible and
stable community? Some studies have answered that as long as the community
is feasible, it will nearly always be stable. In contrast, other studies
have answered that the likelihood is almost null. Here, we show that the
origin of this debate has been the underestimation of the association of
the parameter space of intrinsic growth rates with the feasibility and
stability properties of small randomly-assembled communities. In
particular, we demonstrate that not all parameterizations and sampling
distributions of intrinsic growth rates lead to the same probabilities of
stability and feasibility, which could mistakenly lead to under or
overestimate the stability properties of feasible communities.
Additionally, we find that stability imposes a filtering of species
abundances towards more even distributions in small feasible
randomly-assembled communities. This indicates that the stability of
feasible communities is inherently linked to the starting distribution of
species abundances, a characteristic that many times has been ignored, but
should be incorporated in manageable lab and field experiments. Overall,
these findings show that a more systematic exploration of the feasible
parameter space is necessary to derive general conclusions about the
stability properties of ecological communities