Structure and vulnerability of weighted empirical food webs

Species extinctions are compromising ecosystem functioning and services around the globe. The effects of species loss propagate over food webs (trophic networks). Food webs are directed graphs that represent feeding relationships, encoding matter flows as links between groups of species in an ecosystem. Previous food web research has been limited by reliance on purely theoretical models, few food webs, and only unweighted networks.
In this seminar I will present our research on food web structure and vulnerability based on world's largest database of 245 weighted empirical food webs. Assuming donor-controlled flow dynamics, we simulate the effects of removing a single node. We fit statistical models explaining the observed values of vulnerability indicators through a range of structural properties. I will also briefly look into the mass cycling in food webs and compare it with economic networks.