Related papers: Small world patterns in food webs

Small-world networks, i.e. networks displaying both a high clustering coefficient and a small characteristic path length, are obliquitous in nature. Since their identification, the "small-worldness" metric, as proposed by Humphries and…

Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…

Many social, biological, and economic systems can be approached by complex networks of interacting units. The behaviour of several models on small-world networks has recently been studied. These models are expected to capture the essential…

A general theory of top-down cascades in complex networks is described which explains two similar types of perturbation amplifications in the complex networks of business supply chains (the `bullwhip effect') and ecological food webs…

Small world models are networks consisting of many local links and fewer long range 'shortcuts', used to model networks with a high degree of local clustering but relatively small diameter. Here, we concern ourselves with the distribution…

Ecological networks exhibit non-random structural patterns, such as modularity and nestedness, which indicate ecosystem stability, species diversity, and connectance. Such structure-stability relationships are well known. However, another…

Recent progress in the large scale mapping of social networks is opening new quantitative windows into the structure of human societies. These networks are largely the result of how we access and utilize information. Here I show that a…

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,…

Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…

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,…

We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…

In this study, the concept of small worlds is investigated in the context of large-scale wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Wireless networks are spatial graphs that are usually much more clustered than random networks and have much…

Knowing which parts of a complex system have identical roles simplifies computations and reveals patterns in its network structure. Group theory has been applied to study symmetries in unweighted networks. However, in real-world weighted…

A common feature of biological networks is the geometric property of self-similarity. Molecular regulatory networks through to circulatory systems, nervous systems, social systems and ecological trophic networks, show self-similar…

An important challenge in theoretical ecology is to find good, coarse-grained representations of complex food webs. Here we use the approach of generalized modeling to show that it may be possible to formulate a coarse-graining algorithm…

This article explores the relationship between communities and short cycles in complex networks, based on the fact that nodes more densely connected amongst one another are more likely to be linked through short cycles. By identifying…

We map the conformation space of a simple lattice polymer chain to a network, where (i) the vertices of the network have a one-to-one correspondence to the conformations of the chain, and (ii) a link between two vertices indicates the…

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…

Real-world networks such as the Internet and WWW have many common traits. Until now, hundreds of models were proposed to characterize these traits for understanding the networks. Because different models used very different mechanisms, it…

We draw attention to a clear dichotomy between small-world networks exhibiting exponential neighborhood growth, and fractal-like networks where neighborhoods grow according to a power law. This distinction is observed in a number of…