Dresden 2011 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 7: Posters: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems
BP 7.4: Poster
Monday, March 14, 2011, 17:15–20:00, P3
Species deletion stability of model food webs that include allometric scaling and adaptive foraging — •Lotta Heckmann1, Christian Guill2, and Barbara Drossel1 — 1Institut für Festkörperphysik, TU Darmstadt, Germany — 2Systemic Conservation Biology, J.F. Blumenbach Institute of Zoology and Anthropology, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany
Ecosystems are subjected to various types of perturbations, many of which are due to human influence, including the extinction of species. Knowing the response of ecosystems to large perturbations is of importance for preservation politics, but also for a deeper understanding of the stabilizing mechanisms in ecosystems or food webs. We investigate numerically the response of model food webs that are dynamically stable to the deletion of a species. We quantify the species deletion stability by counting how many species survive after one species has been removed. The data are evaluated in dependence of the trophic function and properties of the eliminated species in order to determine which species are significant for the persistence of the whole food web. Our food web models include nonlinear population dynamics equations with Holling type II functional response, intraspecific competition, and adaptive foraging. The metabolic rates of the species scale allometrically with body mass, and we investigate the influence of different body mass ratios between predator and prey on the stability of the food webs.