Related papers: Species traits and community properties explain sp…
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…
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…
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…
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…
One of the central themes in modern ecology is the enduring debate on whether there is a relationship between the complexity of a biological community and its stability. In this paper, we focus on the role of detritus and spatial dispersion…
Understanding how an extinction event affects ecosystem is fundamental to biodiversity conservation. For this reason, food web response to species loss has been investigated in several ways in the last years. Several studies focused on…
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…
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…
Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us of how they rely on one another for food, pollination and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other…
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…
The distributions of species lifetimes and species in space are related, since species with good local survival chances have more time to colonize new habitats and species inhabiting large areas have higher chances to survive local…
Ecological networks allow us to study the structure and function of ecosystems and gain insights on species resilience/stability. The study of this ecological networks is usually a snapshop focused in a limited specific range of space and…
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…
A detailed analysis of three species-rich ecosystem food webs has shown that they display scale-free distributions of connections. Such graphs of interaction are in fact shared by a number of biological and technological networks, which…
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…
We synthesise traditional unstructured food webs, allometric body size scaling, trait-based modelling, and physiologically structured modelling to provide a novel and ecologically relevant tool for size-structured food webs. The framework…
Body size or mass is one of the main factors underlying food webs structure. A large number of evolutionary models have shown that indeed, the adaptive evolution of body size (or mass) can give rise to hierarchically organised trophic…
The stability of ecosystems as well as the relation between topology and dynamics on multilayer networks are important questions that are usually discussed in separate communities. Here, we combine these two topics by investigating the…
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…
Ecosystems face intensifying threats from climate change, overexploitation, and other human pressures, emphasizing the urgent need to identify keystone species and vulnerable ones. While established network-based measures often rely on a…