Related papers: Small world patterns in food webs
Food webs, networks of feeding relationships among organisms, provide fundamental insights into mechanisms that determine ecosystem stability and persistence. Despite long-standing interest in the compartmental structure of food webs, past…
A simple periodically driven system displaying rich behavior is introduced and studied. The system self-organizes into a mosaic of static ordered regions with three possible patterns, which are threaded by one-dimensional paths on which a…
Supplementing a lattice with long-range connections effectively models small-world networks characterized by a high local and global interconnectedness observed in systems ranging from society to the brain. If the links have a wiring cost…
Ecosystems are formed by networks of species and their interactions. Traditional models of such interactions assume a constant interaction strength between a given pair of species. However, there is often significant trait variation among…
Complex networks as the World Wide Web, the web of human sexual contacts or criminal networks often do not have an engineered architecture but instead are self-organized by the actions of a large number of individuals. From these local…
We propose a dynamical process for network evolution, aiming at explaining the emergence of the small world phenomenon, i.e., the statistical observation that any pair of individuals are linked by a short chain of acquaintances computable…
In ecology it is widely recognised that many landscapes comprise a network of discrete patches of habitat. The species that inhabit the patches interact with each other through a foodweb, the network of feeding interactions. The…
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically-relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and…
Food webs represent the set of consumer-resource interactions among a set of species that co-occur in a habitat, but most food web studies have omitted parasites and their interactions. Recent studies have provided conflicting evidence on…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
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…
We investigate the long-term web structure emerging in evolutionary food web models when different types of functional responses are used. We find that large and complex webs with several trophic layers arise only if the population dynamics…
Interactions in natural communities can be highly heterogeneous, with any given species interacting appreciably with only some of the others, a situation commonly represented by sparse interaction networks. We study the consequences of…
Self-organizing complex systems typically are comprised of a large number of frequently similar components or events. Through their process, a pattern at the global-level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the…
Forty years ago, Robert May questioned a central belief in ecology by proving that sufficiently large or complex ecological networks have probability of persisting close to zero. To prove this point, he analyzed large networks in which…
Notable recent works have focused on the multi-layer properties of coevolving diseases. We point out that very similar systems play an important role in population ecology. Specifically we study a meta food-web model that was recently…
A mathematical model of interacting species filling ecological niches left by the extinction of others is introduced. Species organize themselves into genera of all sizes. The size of a genus on average grows linearly with its age,…
Navigation process is studied on a variant of the Watts-Strogatz small world network model embedded on a square lattice. With probability $p$, each vertex sends out a long range link, and the probability of the other end of this link…
Food-web perturbations stemming from climate change, overexploitation, invasive species, and habitat degradation often cause an initial loss of species that results in a cascade of secondary extinctions, posing considerable challenges to…
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,…