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The origin of motif families in food webs
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Klaise, Janis and Johnson, Samuel (2017) The origin of motif families in food webs. Scientific Reports, 7 (1). 16197. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-15496-1
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15496-1
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 either of the two families by varying this parameter, and correctly classifies almost all the food webs in our database. This is in contrast with the two most popular food web models, the generalized cascade and niche models, which can only generate food webs within a single motif family. Our findings suggest the importance of trophic coherence in modelling local preying patterns in food webs.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | |||||||||
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| Subjects: | Q Science > QH Natural history | |||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Science > Centre for Complexity Science | |||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Food chains (Ecology), Animal communities | |||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Scientific Reports | |||||||||
| Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group | |||||||||
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 | |||||||||
| Official Date: | 23 November 2017 | |||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 7 | |||||||||
| Number: | 1 | |||||||||
| Article Number: | 16197 | |||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-017-15496-1 | |||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | |||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | |||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access | |||||||||
| RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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