New paper: Ecological modeling of paleocommunity food webs

Roopnarine, P. D. 2009. Ecological modeling of paleocommunity food webs. in G. Dietl and K. Flessa, eds., Conservation Paleobiology, The Paleontological Society Papers, 15: 195-220.

Find the paper here:
http://zeus.calacademy.org/roopnarine/Selected_Publications/Roopnarine_09.pdf
or here
http://zeus.calacademy.org/publications/

Interaction (edge) strength and compensation

There continues to be a lack of clarity of the role of interaction strengths in stabilizing ecological communities. Most of the empirical and theoretical work done suggests a predominance of weak links. Strongly coupled species tend to have oscillatory or pseudo-oscillatory interactions, but weak links to stable species may tend to dampen, or reduce the amplitude, of the oscillations. The extent to which this is true, given a large and complex network of a species-rich system, remains unknown. Perhaps one way to explore this is to examine network robustness, CEG-style, while manipulating interaction strengths in the following way:

1. Topological extinction with no link strengths, i.e. all links are of equal and static strength.
2. Current CEG-style link strengths, where in-link strengths for a species are all equal. Strengths would be static.
3. Same as above, but strengths are now dynamic, reflecting compensation for lost links.
4. Same as previous two options, but now repeat with -distributed link strengths, both static and dynamic.