The relationship between and according to the flow adjusting algorithm (FAA) applied to the Mondego ecological network, the randomized Mondego flow network, and the networks generated by the Niche Model.

<p>The black filled circles and red hollow squares are the original and randomized Mondego flow networks, respectively. The randomized flow network retains the topological structure of the Mondego network but assigns the flux randomly. The other dashed curves are for the networks generated by the Niche model <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0072525#pone.0072525-Williams1" target="_blank">[40]</a> with different numbers of nodes (100 or 50) and connectances (0.4 or 0.1), as well as for the randomly assigned flows. The FAA is applied to all these flow networks to obtain the relationships between and . All the exponents represent the averages of the results of 50 random experiments. The red star(“*”) shows the original positions of the dissipation law exponent (0.980) and the allometric exponent (1.012) of the Mondego network. The red open circle corresponds to the combination of the original dissipation law exponent (0.980) and the adjusted allometric exponent (1.011) according to the FAA for the Mondego network.