Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 2: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems (joint session DY/ BP/CPP)

DY 2.3: Talk

Monday, March 16, 2015, 10:15–10:30, BH-N 243

Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in evolving food webs — •Korinna T. Allhoff and Barbara Drossel — TU Darmstadt, Germany

We analyze an evolutionary food web model where each species is characterized by three traits, namely its own body mass, its preferred prey body mass, and the width of its potential prey body mass spectrum. Population dynamics includes feeding and competition interactions and determines which species are viable and which ones go extinct. On a timescale much slower than population dynamics, new species emerge as modifications of existing species. The network structure emerges according to the interplay between population dynamics and evolutionary rules and shows an ongoing species turnover. The model thus gives insights into how the functional diversity changes during the initial network buildup as well as due to extinction avalanches. We investigate the relation between the functional diversity and five community level measures of ecosystem functioning. These are the metabolic loss of the predator community, the total biomasses of the basal and the predator community and the consumption rates on the basal community and within the predator community.