Architecture of marine food webs: To be or not be a 'small-world'.

ABSTRACT: The search for general properties in network structure has been a central issue for food web studies in recent years. One such property is the small-world topology that combines a high clustering and a small distance between nodes of the network. This property may increase food web resilience but make them more sensitive to the extinction of connected species. Food web theory has been developed principally from freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems, largely omitting marine habitats. If theory needs to be modified to accommodate observations from marine ecosystems, based on major differences in several topological characteristics is still on debate. Here we investigated if the small-world topology is a common structural pattern in marine food webs. We developed a novel, simple and statistic

SUBMITTER: Marina TI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5973612 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature