ArticleScientific reports2017
The origin of motif families in food webs.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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8 citing papers in PubMed, 0 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Individual diet variability shapes the architecture of Antarctic benthic food webs.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Influence and influenceability: global directionality in directed complex networks.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Strong connectivity in real directed networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A network simplification approach to ease topological studies about the food-web architecture.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- How directed is a directed network?Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Organisational Social Influence on Directed Hierarchical Graphs, from Tyranny to Anarchy.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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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.
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