Download PDF Here : Download Quantitative Analysis of Ecological Networks
Read PDF Here : Read Quantitative Analysis of Ecological Networks
"Ecology is about understanding how organisms interact with other organisms and the environment they inhabit (i.e. fundamental and realised niches). It is easy to imagine an individual organism of any kind as a dot with all sorts of arrows impinging upon it, an arrow can represent abiotic factors (temperature, light, etc.), as well as many arrows for all the other organisms (biotic factors, intra- and inter-specific interactions) that affect it. Ecology aims tHere : fore to determine the magnitude and rate associated with some of the arrows, and which are the most important and why. Each organism also has its own effects on the same list of factors, even if the effects may be small, so we can also imagine arrows going out from the same dot, one to each of the same list of factors (they can be dots too). Again, a challenge is to determine the associated weights and importance for the arrows, some of which are directed toward other organisms. As soon as we consider more than a single