Modelling Food Webs

TL;DR

This paper reviews theoretical models of food webs, including static, dynamical, and assembly/evolutionary models, highlighting how evolutionary models can generate large, stable webs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of different modeling approaches to food webs and emphasizes the role of evolutionary models in constructing large stable networks.

Findings

Evolutionary models can build large stable food webs.

Static models assign links based on simple rules.

Dynamical models analyze stability of species interactions.

Abstract

We review theoretical approaches to the understanding of food webs. After an overview of the available food web data, we discuss three different classes of models. The first class comprise static models, which assign links between species according to some simple rule. The second class are dynamical models, which include the population dynamics of several interacting species. We focus on the question of the stability of such webs. The third class are species assembly models and evolutionary models, which build webs starting from a few species by adding new species through a process of "invasion" (assembly models) or "speciation" (evolutionary models). Evolutionary models are found to be capable of building large stable webs.