Revisiting the links-species scaling relationship in food webs

• DOI: 10.1101/2020.02.13.947531
• Publication Date: 2020-02-15T01:05:54Z
• Authors: Andrew MacDonald; Francis Banville; Timothée Poisot
• Keywords: 0303 health sciences; power law; Bayesian methods; probabilistic programming; 15. Life on land; Article; QA76.75-76.765; 03 medical and health sciences; 13. Climate action; food webs; constant connectance; Computer software; link-species scaling

AbstractPredicting the number of interactions that species in a food web will establish is an important task. These trophic interactions underlie many ecological and evolutionary processes, ranging from biomass fluxes, ecosystem stability, resilience to extinction, and resistance against novel species. We investigate and compare several ways to predict the number of interactions in food webs. We conclude that a simple beta-binomial model outperforms other models, with the added desirable property of respecting biological constraints. We show how this simple relationship gives rise to a predicted distribution of several quantities related to link number in food webs, including the scaling of network structure with space, and the probability that a network will be stable.