English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Species loss in ecosystems can lead to secondary extinctions as a result of consumer-resource relationships and other species interactions. We compare levels of secondary extinctions in communities generated by four structural food-web models and a fifth null model in response to sequential primary species removals. We focus on various aspects of food-web structural integrity including robustness, community collapse and threshold periods, and how these features relate to assumptions underlying different models, different species loss sequences and simple measures of diversity and complexity. Hierarchical feeding, a fundamental characteristic of food-web structure, appears to impose a cost in terms of robustness and other aspects of structural integrity. However, exponential-type link distributions, also characteristic of more realistic models, generally confer greater structural robustness than the less skewed link distributions of less realistic models. In most cases for the more realistic models, increased robustness and decreased levels of web collapse are associated with increased diversity, measured as species richness S, and increased complexity, measured as connectance C. These and other results, including a surprising sensitivity of more realistic model food webs to loss of species with few links to other species, are compared with prior work based on empirical food-web data.

Cascading extinctions and community collapse in model food webs