QUANTITATIVE PATTERNS IN THE STRUCTURE OF MODEL AND EMPIRICAL FOOD WEBS

By Daniel B. Stouffer, J. Camacho, Roger Guimerà, C. Ng, Luís A. Nunes Amaral. 2004

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the structure of food webs, and the mechanisms that give rise to this structure, is one of the most challenging problems in ecology. We analyze from a statistical physics perspective the network structure of model food webs and of 15 community food webs from a variety of environments, including freshwater, marine, estuarine, and terrestrial environments. We perform a theoretical analysis of two recently proposed models for food webs, the niche model of R. J. Williams and N. D. Martinez and the nested-hierarchy model of M.-F. Cattin et al. We find that the two models generate distributions of numbers of prey, predators, and links that are described by the same analytical expressions. Our analytical treatment reveals that a model's capacity to reproduce empirical data is principally determined by its ability to satisfy two conditions: (1) the species' niche values form a totally ordered set and (2) each species has a specific exponentially decaying probability of preying on a given fraction of the species with lower niche values. To test this hypothesis, we generalize the cascade model of J. E. Cohen and C. M. Newman so that it satisfies condition 2 and find that the new model is able to reproduce the properties of empirical food webs, validating our hypothesis. We use our analytical predictions as a guide to the analysis of 15 of the most complete empirical food webs available. We demonstrate that the quantitative unifying patterns that describe the properties of the food-web models considered earlier also describe the majority of the empirical webs considered. We find good agreement between the empirical data and the models for the average distance between species and the average clustering coefficient. Our results strongly support two hypotheses: first, that any model satisfying the two conditions we identify will accurately reproduce a number of the statistical properties of empirical food webs, and second, that the empirical distributions of number of prey and number of predators follow universal functional forms that, without free parameters, match our analytical predictions.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5cc7cbd01e867c0b67aa25fb1f0e569a430bcf9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Genetics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Freshwater food webs: towards a more fundamental understanding of biodiversity and community dynamics (2012, methodology): “…trying to identify fundamental patterns in the trophic organisation of ecosystems regardless of the habitat (e.g. Dunne, Williams & Martinez, 2002a, Stouffer et al., 2005) and for characterising baseline structural robustness of systems (e.g. Sole & Montoya, 2001; Dunne, Williams & Martinez,…”
The Network Structure of Food Webs (2005, unknown): “Differences and similarities among particular models with respect to such properties are not addressed by the general analytical model (Stouffer et al. 2005).”
Parasites in food webs: the ultimate missing links (2008, methodology): “The arrangement of consumer and resource species along the interval may reflect their size, metabolic rate or trophic position (Stouffer et al. 2005).”
Scaling of Food-Web Properties with Diversity and Complexity Across Ecosystems (2010, methodology): “Recent structural food-web models (Allesina et al., 2008; Cattin et al., 2004; Stouffer et al., 2005; Williams and Martinez, 2000) include dependence of network topology on species richness and connectance, and predict food-web properties depending on contiguous feeding ranges within an ordered set ”
Inferring food web structure from predator–prey body size relationships (2013, background): “2004), the minimum potential model (Allesina, Alonso & Pascual 2008), the probabilistic niche model (Williams, Anandanadesan & Purves 2010) are somehow derived from these rules (Stouffer et al. 2005).”
Merging DNA metabarcoding and ecological network analysis to understand and build resilient terrestrial ecosystems (2016, background): “However, comparative studies of ecological network structures across a wider range of network types have: a) revealed general patterns in how consumer–resource interactions among species are organized (Dunne, Williams & Martinez 2002b; Stouffer et al. 2005; Williams & Martinez 2008); b) produced suc”
Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity. (2012, background): “These simple models allow exploration of how food-web structure systematically depends on the number of links and species in a system [20].”