Related papers: Evidence for the Dominance of Indirect Effects in …

The question what determines the structure of natural food webs has been listed among the nine most important unanswered questions in ecology. It arises naturally from many problems related to ecosystem stability and resilience. The…

Diffusion processes in networks are increasingly used to model the spread of information and social influence. In several applications in computational sustainability such as the spread of wildlife, infectious diseases and traffic mobility…

Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…

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,…

In this paper we consider a three level food web subject to a disease affecting the bottom prey. The resulting dynamics is much richer with respect to the purely demographic model, in that it contains more transcritical bifurcations, gluing…

The long-term resilient property of ecosystems has been quantified as ecological robustness (RECO) in terms of the energy transfer over food webs. The RECO of resilient ecosystems favors a balance of food webs' network efficiency and…

Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…

Models of network diffusion typically rely on the Laplacian matrix, capturing interactions via direct connections. Beyond direct interactions, information in many systems can also flow via indirect pathways, where influence typically…

Previous work has shown that species interacting in an ecosystem and actors transacting in an economic context may have notable similarities in behavior. However, the specific mechanism that may underlie similarities in nature and human…

Trophic coherence, a measure of the extent to which the nodes of a directed network are organised in levels, has recently been shown to be closely related to many structural and dynamical aspects of complex systems, including graph…

Transport networks are crucial to the functioning of natural and technological systems. Nature features transport networks that are adaptive over a vast range of parameters, thus providing an impressive level of robustness in supply.…

Species interactions (ranging from direct predator prey relationships to indirect effects mediated by the environment) are central to ecosystem balance and biodiversity. While empirical methods for measuring these interactions exist, their…

Flow networks are essential for both living organisms and enginneered systems. These networks often present complex dynamics controlled, at least in part, by their topology. Previous works have shown that topologically complex networks…

The rapidly developing theory of complex networks indicates that real networks are not random, but have a highly robust large-scale architecture, governed by strict organizational principles. Here, we focus on the properties of biological…

With improvements in data resolution and quality, researchers can now represent complex systems as signed, weighted, and directed networks. In this article, we introduce a framework for measuring net and indirect effects without simplifying…

Intercellular exchange networks are essential for the adaptive capabilities of populations of cells. While diffusional exchanges have traditionally been difficult to map, recent advances in nanotechnology enable precise probing of exchange…

We explore the hypothesis that the relative abundance of feedback loops in many empirical complex networks is severely reduced owing to the presence of an inherent global directionality. Aimed at quantifying this idea, we propose a simple…

Microbes can affect processes from food production to human health. Such microbes are not isolated, but rather interact with each other and establish connections with their living environments. Understanding these interactions is essential…

Ecosystems are governed by dynamic processes such as competition for resources, reproduction and dispersal. These shape their biodiversity and how the system responds to change. Current approaches to modelling ecosystems, especially plants,…

Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…