Regime shifts in marine communities: a complex systems perspective on food web dynamics.

ABSTRACT: Species composition and habitats are changing at unprecedented rates in the world's oceans, potentially causing entire food webs to shift to structurally and functionally different regimes. Despite the severity of these regime shifts, elucidating the precise nature of their underlying processes has remained difficult. We address this challenge with a new analytic approach to detect and assess the relative strength of different driving processes in food webs. Our study draws on complexity theory, and integrates the network-centric exponential random graph modelling (ERGM) framework developed within the social sciences with community ecology. In contrast to previous research, this approach makes clear assumptions of direction of causality and accommodates a dynamic perspective on the emergen

SUBMITTER: Yletyinen J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4810827 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature