Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 30: Networks: From Topology to Dynamics V (joint DY, BP, SOE)

BP 30.1: Talk

Thursday, March 25, 2010, 16:00–16:15, H44

Eat the specialist: Some results on the stability of 100 billion food webs — •Thilo Gross — Max-Planck Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Nöthnitzer Straße 38, 01187 Dresden

Ecological food webs are complex networks of feeding interactions, describing who-eats-who in an ecosystem. Previous theoretical results suggest that the dynamical stability of these webs should decrease with increasing number of species and network connections. Yet, large and densely-linked webs found in nature are highly stable. Identification of the properties promoting stability is therefore an important goal of ecological research. The approach of generalized modeling enables us to investigate the local stability of steady states in these webs with a higher degree of generality and efficiency than previous simulative approaches. Because of the complexity of the problem, a general food web model contains several thousand unknown parameters. However, the numerical efficiency of the generalized models is such that tens of billions of different realizations of plausible webs can be analyzed in reasonable computational time. This provides a sound basis for the statistical exploration of the high-dimensional parameter space. In this talk I will demonstrate the application of generalized modeling, in simple examples and in large food webs. The latter reveals certain topological properties having a strong impact on network stability.