Abstract
Link distribution is an important architectural feature of ecological networks, since it is thought to influence community dynamics. Several attempts have been made in order to characterize the typical link distribution of food webs, but the number of webs studied thus far is low and their quality is unbalanced. Comparability is a rarely asked methodological question, and as far as we see only two data bases are available which allow reliable comparison of food webs: one for terrestrial, high resolution, host-parasitoid webs and another for highly aggregated, marine trophic networks. We present an analysis of a set of food webs belonging to the latter type, since the host-parasitoid networks are only subgraphs and therefore uninformative on the structure of the entire community. We address the following three questions: (1) how to characterize the link distribution of these small networks which cannot always be fitted statistically to well-known distributions (such as the exponential or the Poisson, etc.), (2) are these distributions of more or less similar shape or they belong to different „architectural classes”, and (3) if there are different classes, then what are their distinctive topological and biological properties. We suggest that link distribution of such small networks can be compared to each other by principal coordinates ordination and clustering. We conclude that (1) the webs can be categorized into two different classes, and (2) one of the classes contains significantly larger and topologically more heterogeneous webs for which net output of material is also of higher variance. We emphasize that link distribution is an interesting and important property not only in case of complex, speciose food webs, but also in highly aggregated, low-resolution webs.
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Abbreviations
- DOC:
-
Dissolved Organic Carbon
- NO CV:
-
Coefficient of Variation of Net Output Values
- PCA:
-
Principal Components Analysis
- PCoA:
-
Principal Coordinates Analysis
- POC:
-
Particulate Organic Carbon
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Jordán, F., Scheuring, I., Vasas, V. et al. Architectural classes of aquatic food webs based on link distribution. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 7, 81–90 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.7.2006.1.8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.7.2006.1.8