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Concept
Ecological network
Summary
An ecological network is a representation of the biotic interactions in an ecosystem, in which species (nodes) are connected by pairwise interactions (links). These interactions can be trophic or symbiotic. Ecological networks are used to describe and compare the structures of real ecosystems, while network models are used to investigate the effects of network structure on properties such as ecosystem stability.
Historically, research into ecological networks developed from descriptions of trophic relationships in aquatic food webs; however, recent work has expanded to look at other food webs as well as webs of mutualists. Results of this work have identified several important properties of ecological networks.
Complexity (linkage density): the average number of links per species. Explaining the observed high levels of complexity in ecosystems has been one of the main challenges and motivations for ecological network analysis, since early theory predicted that complexity should lead to instability.
Connectance: the proportion of possible links between species that are realized (links/species2). In food webs, the level of connectance is related to the statistical distribution of the links per species. The distribution of links changes from (partial) power-law to exponential to uniform as the level of connectance increases. The observed values of connectance in empirical food webs appear to be constrained by the variability of the physical environment, by habitat type, which will reflect on an organism's diet breadth driven by optimal foraging behaviour. This ultimately links the structure of these ecological networks to the behaviour of individual organisms.
Degree distribution: the degree distribution of an ecological network is the cumulative distribution for the number of links each species has. The degree distributions of food webs have been found to display the same universal functional form. The degree distribution can be split into its two component parts, links to a species' prey (aka.
Official source
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