Related papers: No complexity-stability relationship in natural co…
Few of food web theory hypotheses/predictions can be readily tested using empirical data. An exception is represented by simple probabilistic models for food web structure, for which the likelihood has been derived. Here I test the…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
Empirical observations show that ecological communities can have a huge number of coexisting species, also with few or limited number of resources. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple type of interactions, in particular…
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…
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,…
The stable functionality of networked systems is a hallmark of their natural ability to coordinate between their multiple interacting components. Yet, strikingly, real-world networks seem random and highly irregular, apparently lacking any…
Although classical economic theory is based on the concept of stable equilibrium, real economic systems appear to be always out of equilibrium. Indeed, they share many of the dynamical features of other complex systems, e.g., ecological…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
Nested structure, which is non-random, controls cooperation dynamics and biodiversity in plant-animal mutualistic networks. This structural pattern has been explained in a static (non-growth) network models. However, evolutionary processes…
The Chesapeake Bay, one of the largest estuaries in the United States, is an ecological system of great complexity and relevance. The food web is composed of thirty-six trophic components, all of which are functionally connected. In this…
Just as a herd of animals relies on its robust social structure to survive in the wild, similarly robustness is a crucial characteristic for the survival of a complex network under attack. The capacity to measure robustness in complex…
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…
The structure of complex networks has been of interest in many scientific and engineering disciplines over the decades. A number of studies in the field have been focused on finding the common properties among different kinds of networks…
We use dynamical generating functionals to study the stability and size of communities evolving in Lotka-Volterra systems with random interaction coefficients. The size of the eco-system is not set from the beginning. Instead, we start from…
The structure of ecological networks, in particular food webs, determines their ability to evolve further, i.e. evolvability. The knowledge about how food web evolvability is determined by the structures of diverse ecological networks can…
Although most networks in nature exhibit complex topology the origins of such complexity remains unclear. We introduce a model of a growing network of interacting agents in which each new agent's membership to the network is determined by…
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…
We adapt existing statistical modeling techniques for social networks to study consumption data observed in trophic food webs. These data describe the feeding volume (non-negative) among organisms grouped into nodes, called trophic species,…
A number of recent studies have focused on the statistical properties of networked systems such as social networks and the World-Wide Web. Researchers have concentrated particularly on a few properties which seem to be common to many…
Quantifying population dynamics is a fundamental challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology, particularly for species that are cryptic, microscopic, or extinct. Traditional approaches rely on continuous representations of population…