Related papers: Robust Patterns in Food Web Structure

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…

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…

Food webs -- networks of predators and prey -- have long been known to exhibit "intervality": species can generally be ordered along a single axis in such a way that the prey of any given predator tend to lie on unbroken compact intervals.…

Let a collection of networks represent interactions within several (social or ecological) systems. We pursue two objectives: identifying similarities in the topological structures that are held in common between the networks and clustering…

Real food web data available in the literature presents us with the relations between various species, sizes of these species, metabolic types of the species and other useful information, which allows us to define parameters for the…

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 investigate global stability and dynamics of large ecological networks by classical methods of the dynamical system theory, including Hamiltonian methods, and averaging. Our analysis exploits the network topological structure, namely,…

We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the eco-system…

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…

In this study three soil ecosystems, that differ in the type of management, have been compared in the attempt to understand if and how anthropogenic action affects them. The structure of the corresponding food webs was analyzed and their…

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…

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…

Ecological modelling of increasingly more complex microbial populations is necessary to reflect the highly functional and diverse behaviour inherent to many systems found in reality. Anaerobic digestion is one such process that has…

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…

Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…

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,…

A classic measure of ecological stability describes the tendency of a community to return to equilibrium after small perturbation. While many advances show how the network structure of these communities severely constrains such tendencies,…

We develop a stochastic, individual-based model for food web simulation which in the large-population limit reduces to the well-studied Webworld model, which has been used to successfully construct model food webs with several realistic…

Network analysis has revealed whole-network properties hypothesized to be general characteristics of ecosystems including pathway proliferation, and network non-locality, homogenization, amplification, mutualism, and synergism. Collectively…

The analysis of some species-rich, well-defined food webs shows that they display the so called Small World behavior shared by a number of disparate complex systems. The three systems analysed (Ythan estuary web, Silwood web and the Little…