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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…

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…

A principle of evolutionary adaptation is applied to the Lotka--Volterra models, in particular to the food webs. We present a relatively simple computational algorithm of optimization with respect to a given criterion. This algorithm boils…

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…

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…

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 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…

We incorporate the generic hierarchical architecture of foodwebs into a "{\it unified}" model that describes both "micro" and "macro" evolutions within a single theoretical framework. This model describes the "micro" -evolution in detail by…

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…

Why are large, complex ecosystems stable? Both theory and simulations of current models predict the onset of instability with growing size and complexity, so for decades it has been conjectured that ecosystems must have some unidentified…

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…

Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…

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 present results contrasting food webs constructed using the same model where the source of species was either evolution or immigration from a previously evolved species pool. The overall structure of the webs are remarkably similar,…

In the last three decades, researchers have tried to establish universal patterns about the structure of food webs. Recently was proposed that the exponent $\eta$ characterizing the efficiency of the energy transportation of the food web…

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…

Transformations to create more sustainable social-ecological systems are urgently needed. Structural change is a feature of transformations of social-ecological systems that is of critical importance but is little understood. Here, we…

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…

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…