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We analyze the properties of model food webs and of fifteen community food webs from a variety of environments. We first perform a theoretical analysis of the niche model of Williams and Martinez. We derive analytical expressions for the…
Simulations of the coevolution of many interacting species are performed using the Webworld model. The model has a realistic set of predator-prey equations that describe the population dynamics of the species for any structure of the food…
We analyze the properties of seven community food webs from a variety of environments--including freshwater, marine-freshwater interfaces and terrestrial environments. We uncover quantitative unifying patterns that describe the properties…
Food webs are networks describing who is eating whom in an ecological community. By now it is clear that many aspects of food-web structure are reproducible across diverse habitats, yet little is known about the driving force behind this…
Food webs represent the set of consumer-resource interactions among a set of species that co-occur in a habitat, but most food web studies have omitted parasites and their interactions. Recent studies have provided conflicting evidence on…
Food webs -- networks of predators and prey -- have long been known to exhibit "intervality": species can generally be ordered along a single axis in such a way that the prey of any given predator tend to lie on unbroken compact intervals.…
Within food webs, species can be partitioned into groups according to various criteria. Two notions have received particular attention: trophic groups, which have been used for decades in the ecological literature, and more recently,…
Food webs have been found to exhibit remarkable motif profiles, patterns in the relative prevalences of all possible three-species sub-graphs, and this has been related to ecosystem properties such as stability and robustness. Analysing 46…
Food webs, networks of feeding relationships among organisms, provide fundamental insights into mechanisms that determine ecosystem stability and persistence. Despite long-standing interest in the compartmental structure of food webs, past…
Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these…
The networks of predator-prey interactions in ecological systems are remarkably complex, but nevertheless surprisingly stable in terms of long term persistence of the system as a whole. In order to understand the mechanism driving the…
We report the results of carrying out a large number of simulations on a coevolutionary model of multispecies communities. A wide range of parameter values were investigated which allowed a rather complete picture of the change in behaviour…
We review theoretical approaches to the understanding of food webs. After an overview of the available food web data, we discuss three different classes of models. The first class comprise static models, which assign links between species…
We investigate in detail the model of a trophic web proposed by Amaral and Meyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 652 (1999)]. We focused on small-size systems that are relevant for real biological food webs and for which the fluctuations are playing…
In this work we analyse the topological and dynamical properties of a simple model of complex food webs, namely the niche model. In order to underline competition among species, we introduce "prey" and "predators" weighted overlap graphs…
We use food webs generated by a model to investigate the effects of deleting species on other species in the web and on the web as a whole. The model incorporates a realistic population dynamics, adaptive foragers and other features which…
This is the second of two papers dedicated to the relationship between population models of competition and biodiversity. Here we consider species assembly models where the population dynamics is kept far from fixed points through the…
We introduce the Webworld model, which links together the ecological modelling of food web structure with the evolutionary modelling of speciation and extinction events. The model describes dynamics of ecological communities on an…
We develop a set of equations to describe the population dynamics of many interacting species in food webs. Predator-prey interactions are non-linear, and are based on ratio-dependent functional responses. The equations account for…
It is a challenge to predict the response of a large, complex system to a perturbation. Recent attempts to predict the behaviour of food webs have revealed that the effort needed to understand a system grows quickly with its complexity,…