Complexity and fragility in ecological networks

A detailed analysis of three species–rich ecosystem food webs has shown that they display skewed distributions of connections. Such graphs of interaction are, in fact, shared by a number of biological and technological networks, which have been shown to display a very high homeostasis against random removals of nodes. Here, we analyse the responses of these ecological graphs to both random and selective perturbations (directed against the most–connected species). Our results suggest that ecological networks are very robust against random removals but can be extremely fragile when selective attacks are used. These observations have important consequences for biodiversity dynamics and conservation issues, current estimations of extinction rates and the relevance and definition of keystone species.

• Publication year

  2000

• Venue

  Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences

• Publication date

  2000-11-10

• Fields of study

  Biology, Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Environmental Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rspb.2001.1767arXiv cond-mat/0011196PMID 11571051PMCID PMC1088846
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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