Luís A. Nunes Amaral
co-Director, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering
Professor of Physics & Astronomy (by courtesy)
Professor of Medicine (by courtesy)
Chemical & Biological Engineering
2145 Sheridan Road (Room E136)
Evanston, IL 60208, US
Phone:
(847) 491-7850
Analytical solution of a model for complex food webs
Physical Review E 65, 030901 (2002)
Times cited: 51
Abstract
We investigate numerically and analytically a recently proposed model for food webs [Nature 404, 180 (2000)] in the limit of large web sizes and sparse interaction matrices. We obtain analytical expressions for several quantities with ecological interest, in particular, the probability distributions for the number of prey and the number of predators. We find that these distributions have fast-decaying exponential and Gaussian tails, respectively. We also find that our analytical expressions are robust to changes in the details of the model.