Revisiting the Links-Species Scaling Relationship in Food Webs.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 33205136.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100079 and PMC identifier 7660400.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Predicting the number of interactions among species in a food web is an important task. These trophic interactions underlie many ecological and evolutionary processes, ranging from biomass fluxes, ecosystem stability, resilience to extinction, and resistance against novel species. We investigate and compare several ways to predict the number of interactions in food webs. We conclude that a simple beta-binomial model outperforms other models, with the added desirable property of respecting biological constraints. We show how this simple relationship gives rise to a predicted distribution of several quantities related to link number in food webs, including the scaling of network structure with space and the probability that a network will be stable.