Population dynamics on complex food webs

In this work we analyze the topological and dynamical properties of a simple model of complex food webs, namely the niche model. In order to underline competition among species, we introduce "prey" and "predators" weighted overlap graphs derived from the niche model and compare synthetic food webs with real data. Doing so, we find new tests for the goodness of synthetic food web models and indicate a possible direction of improvement for existing ones. We then exploit the weighted overlap graphs to define a competition kernel for LotkaVolterra population dynamics and find that for such a model the stability of food webs decreases with its ecological complexity. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company