Studying the structure of food webs: an introduction to algorithms for their construction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22201/ib.20078706e.2024.95.5164Keywords:
Trophic relationships, Trophic webs, Graph theoryAbstract
The relationships between various populations allow the description of different types of interactions among
species, such as consumption, foraging, parasitism, and pollination, to name a few. When these occur between
resources and consumers, they are known as trophic relationships, and the set of trophic relationships in a community or an ecosystem describes a food web. These webs are of ecological importance as they outline the direction and flow of energy within the ecosystem, are essential for analyzing the dynamics and biodiversity of the system, and their realistic construction is key for studying biological communities. In recent decades, some authors have proposed models that replicate several important properties of food webs. However, as far as we know, the implementation of these models has not been standardized nor made available to the scientific community in any public repository. In this work, we present 3 of the most used models for creating food webs and representative indicators that provide
information about structure and composition of the network. Additionally, we share the codes for the models and indicators so they can be replicated and used in other research.
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