Eat the specialist: Generalized models reveal stabilizing patterns in food webs
- When?
- Friday 25 May 2012, 16:00 to 17:00
- Where?
- 22AA04
- Open to:
- Students, Staff
- Speaker:
- Thilo Gross (University of Bristol)
Abstract: Food webs are the networks of who-eats-who in ecology. Despite being large and complex, the food webs observed in nature show relatively stable, stationary dynamics. Understanding this stability of food webs is a central challenge in ecology and could also inspire the design of more robust technical and organizational networks. Exploring food web stability is challenging because the food webs constitute high-dimensional and strongly nonlinear systems with dynamics on many different time scales.
In this talk I explore the dynamics of food webs, with generalized models - an alternative modeling approach that is based on the analytical parameterization of the Jacobian all possible steady states in a large class of food web models. Thereby I identify a specific topological pattern that naturally arises in real-world food webs as an important stabilizing factor.