Simple rules yield complex food webs

By Neo D. Martinez, Richard J. Williams. Nature, 2000

1,434 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6c0266d005791a1f72833099976f52c4900ace5

How researchers see this paper

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

In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Complexity and stability of ecological networks: a review of the theory (2018, methodology): “Nested diets have been observed in food webs: top predators are very generalists and prey upon all over species, while the next predator exploiting all but the top predators (in the niche model by Williams and Martinez 2000, and the nested-hierarchy model by; Cattin et al.”
Towards novel approaches to modelling biotic interactions in multispecies assemblages at large spatial extents (2012, background): “Another starting point for extending the network approach to a spatial domain could be the ‘niche model’ of Williams & Martinez (2000) where diet breadth and food web interactions are modelled using simple assumptions along a one-dimensional trophic niche space (a resource axis).”
Spread of epidemic disease on networks. (2002, background): “Social networks [6, 7, 8, 9], technological networks [10, 11, 12, 13], and biological networks [14, 15, 16, 17, 18] have all been examined and modeled in some detail.”
Complexity and fragility in ecological networks (2000, background): “Because of the limitations of the available data in terms of both taxonomic resolution and size (Polis, 1991; Cohen et al., 1993; Williams and Martinez, 2000) our study is limited to the three richest and best-described food webs available in the ecological literature (figure 2).”
Food web structure and body size: trophic position and resource acquisition (2010, background): “The potential for relaxation in gape limitation with body size, as a main determinant of trophic interaction, has been proposed several times elsewhere (Hairston and Hairston 1993, Williams and Martinez 2000, Sherwood et al. 2002a, Woodward et al. 2005, Brose et al. 2006b, Raffaelli 2007).”
Scaling up keystone effects from simple to complex ecological networks (2005, methodology): “For each combination of species richness, connectance, and resource supply, we use the Niche Model ( Williams & Martinez 2000 ) to randomly generate 100 different ecologically realistic food-web networks that were constrained to have four basal species.”
Evidence for the existence of a robust pattern of prey selection in food webs (2007, methodology): “The implementation of the niche model ( Williams & Martinez 2000), nested-hierarchy model (Cattin et al. 2004) and generalized cascade model (Stouffer et al. 2005) is followed as originally detailed.”
Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance (2002, methodology): “Lotka–Volterra dynamical studies are difficult to parameterize with empirical data, and the models generally fail to adequately portray many aspects of observed ecosystems, including large numbers of species and nonrandom, complex, yet predictable topology of trophic structure ( Williams & Martinez ”
Community detection in graphs (2009, background): “Some authors have pointed out that the original expression of modularity is not ideal to detect communities in bipartite graphs, which describe several real systems, like food webs [229], scientific [202] and artistic [201] collaboration networks, etc.”
The ecological consequences of complex topology and nested structure in pollination webs. (2006, background): “Similar patterns have been documented in the ecological literature in recent years, yet few data with sufficient resolution are available (Dunne et al. 2002; Montoya and Sole 2002; Williams and Martinez 2000).”
The Network Structure of Food Webs (2005, positive): “While from one perspective, food-chain length and trophic-level properties are just a few of many possible metrics of food-web structure (Williams and Martinez 2000), there is a very rich body of research specifically on chain lengths and trophic levels that spans theoretical, observational,…”