The origin of motif families in food webs.

ABSTRACT: Food webs have been found to exhibit remarkable "motif profiles", patterns in the relative prevalences of all possible three-species subgraphs, and this has been related to ecosystem properties such as stability and robustness. Analysing 46 food webs of various kinds, we find that most food webs fall into one of two distinct motif families. The separation between the families is well predicted by a global measure of hierarchical order in directed networks-trophic coherence. We find that trophic coherence is also a good predictor for the extent of omnivory, defined as the tendency of species to feed on multiple trophic levels. We compare our results to a network assembly model that admits tunable trophic coherence via a single free parameter. The model is able to generate food webs in eithe

SUBMITTER: Klaise J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5700930 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature