  From 08-12 August, 2022, 32 individuals participated in a workshop, Stability
and Fluctuations in Complex Ecological Systems, at the Lorentz Center, located
in Leiden, The Netherlands. An interdisciplinary dialogue between ecologists,
mathematicians, and physicists provided a foundation of important problems to
consider over the next 5-10 years. This paper outlines eight areas including
(1) improving our understanding of the effect of scale, both temporal and
spatial, for both deterministic and stochastic problems; (2) clarifying the
different terminologies and definitions used in different scientific fields;
(3) developing a comprehensive set of data analysis techniques arising from
different fields but which can be used together to improve our understanding of
existing data sets; (4) having theoreticians/computational scientists
collaborate closely with empirical ecologists to determine what new data should
be collected; (5) improving our knowledge of how to protect and/or restore
ecosystems; (6) incorporating socio-economic effects into models of ecosystems;
(7) improving our understanding of the role of deterministic and stochastic
fluctuations; (8) studying the current state of biodiversity at the functional
level, taxa level and genome level.
