event
Thursday 06 Oct 2011: Maths seminar - Eat the specialist: Generalized models reveal stabilizing factors in food webs
Thilo Gross - University of Bristol
Harrison 203 15:00-16:00
Food webs are the networks of who-eats-who in ecology. Despite being large
and complex, the food webs observed in nature show relatively stable, stationary
dynamics. Understanding this stability of food webs is a central challenge in ecology
and could also inspre the design of more robust technical and organizational networks.
Exploring food web stability is challenging because the food webs constitute
high-dimensional and strongly nonlinear systems with dynamics on many different
time scales. In this talk I explore the dynamics of food webs, with generalized models -
an alternative modeling approach that is based on the analytical parameterization of
the Jacobian all possible steady states in a large class of food web models. Thereby I
identify a specific topological pattern that naturally arises in real-world food webs as
an important stabilizing factor.
