Robust patterns in food web structure.

By J. Camacho, Roger Guimerà, Luís A. Nunes Amaral. Physical Review Letters, 2001

295 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze the properties of seven community food webs from a variety of environments, including freshwater, marine-freshwater interfaces, and terrestrial environments. We uncover quantitative unifying patterns that describe the properties of the diverse trophic webs considered and suggest that statistical physics concepts such as scaling and universality may be useful in the description of ecosystems. Specifically, we find that several quantities characterizing these diverse food webs obey functional forms that are universal across the different environments considered. The empirical results are in remarkable agreement with the analytical solution of a recently proposed model for food webs.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae8c77730739ec6118404527565d66d90c2ed9ff

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Citations in the corpus

Boolean dynamics of networks with scale-free topology (2003, background): “In particular, it has been recently shown by Barabási, Newman, Solé and many other authors that a great variety of real networks exhibit a scale-free topology, including the WWW and the Internet [2], social networks [21], metabolic and protein networks[14,15,23] , ecological networks[8,24], and gene”
Analyzing and modeling real-world phenomena with complex networks: a survey of applications (2007, background): “In addition, food webs have been studied in terms of robustness [417] using concepts of scaling and universality.”
Characterization of topological keystone species: Local, global and “meso-scale” centralities in food webs (2007, background): “St. Marks Seagrass (N = 48, E = 218) is formed mostly by macroinvertebrates, fishes, and birds associated with an estuarine seagrass community,Halodule wrightii, at St. Marks Refuge in Florida (Christian and Luczkovich, 1999).”
Finding and evaluating community structure in networks. (2003, background): “Network ideas have been applied with great success to topics as diverse as the Internet and the world wide web [5, 6, 7], epidemiology [8, 9, 10, 11], scientific citation and collaboration [12, 13], metabolism [14, 15], and ecosystems [16, 17], to name but a few.”
The Structure and Function of Complex Networks (2003, methodology): “Statistical studies of the topologies of food webs have been carried out by Solé and Montoya [289, 374], Camacho, Guimerà, and Amaral [82], and Dunne et al.”
Continuous-Time Dynamic Network Embeddings (2018, background): “In recent years, network (graph/relational) data has grown at a tremendous rate; it is present in domains such as the Internet and the world-wide web [8, 11, 21], scientific citation and collaboration [43, 47], epidemiology [34, 42, 45, 51], communication analysis [60], metabolism [32, 66], ecosyste”
Extinction cascades and catastrophe in ancient food webs (2006, background): “Arguments support the presence of both exponential and power law distributions in empirical modern food webs (Martinez 1992; Williams and Martinez 2000; Camacho et al. 2002), but some recent observations suggest that exponential distributions occur more frequently (Dunne et al. 2002).”
Evidence for the existence of a robust pattern of prey selection in food webs (2007, background): “…van Veen & Murrell 2005; Camacho et al. 2007), such as the existence of universal forms for the distributions of numbers of prey and predators (Camacho et al. 2002a,b; Stouffer et al. 2005) Motivated by this fact, we investigate here whether there are any robust patterns in the structural…”
The Network Structure of Food Webs (2005, unknown): “All studies looking at small-world structure in food webs (Montoya and Solé 2002; Camacho et al. 2002b; Dunne et al. 2002a, 2004; Williams et al. 2002) have reported short path lengths similar to random expectations (i.e., “two degrees of separation”; Williams et al. 2002), consistent with one…”
Complexity and stability of ecological networks: a review of the theory (2018, background): “(1996), Memmott (1999), Solé and Montoya (2001), Camacho et al. (2002), Dunne et al. (2002b), Montoya and Solé (2002);Vázquez and Aizen (2003) and Dunne and Williams (2009) Mutualism: Jordano et al. (2003) and Rohr et al.”