Bounds on food web connectance

Predicting the effects of temperature on food web connectance.

Few models concern how environmental variables such as temperature affect community structure. Here, we develop a model of how temperature affects food web connectance, a powerful driver of population dynamics and community structure. We use the Arrhenius equation to add temperature dependence of foraging traits to an existing model of food web structure. The model predicts potentially large te...

Food-web structure and network theory: The role of connectance and size.

Networks from a wide range of physical, biological, and social systems have been recently described as "small-world" and "scale-free." However, studies disagree whether ecological networks called food webs possess the characteristic path lengths, clustering coefficients, and degree distributions required for membership in these classes of networks. Our analysis suggests that the disagreements a...

Correction: Indirect Energy Flows in Niche Model Food Webs: Effects of Size and Connectance.

Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance

Jennifer A. Dunne,* Richard J. Williams and Neo D. Martinez Romberg Tiburon Center, San Francisco State University, Tiburon, CA 94920, USA Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Food-web structure mediates dramatic effects of biodiversity loss including secondary and ‘cascading’ extinctions. We studied these effects by simulating primary sp...

Food webs robustness to biodiversity loss: the roles of connectance, expansibility and degree distribution.

We analyse the robustness of food webs against species loss by considering the influence of several structural factors of the networks, such as connectance, degree distribution and expansibility. The last concept refers to the absence of structural bottlenecks in the food web, whose removal separate the network into large isolate clusters. In theory networks with identical connectance can displ...