"How to Build a Food Web from Scratch" @ Northwestern, Dec 9

Understanding the main forces shaping the topology of food webs (networks depicting who eats whom in an ecosystem) is a central problem in ecology. This problem has been typically investigated using simple probabilistic models, in which species are connected to each other following simple rules. I review recent progress in food web models, with an emphasis on model selection. I discuss two cases: one in which species are grouped according to their trophic role, the other in which the relations among body sizes determine the topology of the network.