IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/safiwp/00-10-059.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Small World Patterns in Food Webs

Author

Listed:
  • Jose M. Montoya
  • Ricard V. Solé

Abstract

The analysis of some species-rich, well-defined food webs shows that they display the so called Small World behavior shared by a number of disparate complex systems. The three systems analysed (Ythan estuary web, Silwood web and the Little Rock lake web) have different levels of taxonomic resolution, but all of them involve high clustering and short path lengths between species. Additionally, the distribution of connections $P(k)$ is skewed in all the webs analysed and shows a power-law behavior $P(k) \propto k^{-\gamma}$ in two cases (with $\gamma \approx 1$). These features suggest that communities might be self-organized in such a way that high homeostasis to perturbations (with short transient times to recovery) would be at work. The consequences for ecological theory are outlined.

Suggested Citation

  • Jose M. Montoya & Ricard V. Solé, 2000. "Small World Patterns in Food Webs," Working Papers 00-10-059, Santa Fe Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:wop:safiwp:00-10-059
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Matutinovic, Igor, 2002. "Organizational patterns of economies: an ecological perspective," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(3), pages 421-440, March.
    2. Ramon Ferrer i Cancho & Ricard V. Solé, 2001. "The Small-World of Human Language," Working Papers 01-03-016, Santa Fe Institute.
    3. Hai-Bo Hu & Lin Wang, 2005. "The Gini Coefficient'S Application To General Complex Networks," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 8(01), pages 159-167.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wop:safiwp:00-10-059. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/epstfus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.