Models for Food Webs

Abstract

Food webs are complex systems of many interacting biological species. After summarizing some of their properties, this contribution presents different ways of modeling food webs. It briefly mentions static models and discusses dynamical models and their population dynamics equations. The complexity-stability debate is mentioned, and evolutionary food web models are presented as a natural way of obtaining large stable webs. Computer simulation results for a particular evolutionary model are shown to reproduce several important features of real food webs, including the prevalence of weak links.