Roger Guimera
Adjunct Professor
Chemical Engineering
Av. Paisos Catalans 26
Tarragona, Catalonia E-43007, Spain
Chemical & Biological Engineering
2145 Sheridan Road (Room E136)
Evanston, IL 60208, US
Robust patterns in food web structure
Physical Review Letters 88, 228102 (2002)
Times cited: 154
Abstract
We analyze the properties of seven community food webs from a variety of environments, including freshwater, marine-freshwater interfaces, and terrestrial environments. We uncover quantitative unifying patterns that describe the properties of the diverse trophic webs considered and suggest that statistical physics concepts such as scaling and universality may be useful in the description of ecosystems. Specifically, we find that several quantities characterizing these diverse food webs obey functional forms that are universal across the different environments considered. The empirical results are in remarkable agreement with the analytical solution of a recently proposed model for food webs.