#Exploring the evolutionary signature of food webs’ backbones using functional traits

##Abstract Increasing evidence suggests that an appropriate model for food webs, the network of feeding links in a community of species, should take into account the inherent variability of ecological interactions. Harnessing this variability, we will show that it is useful to interpret empirically observed food webs as realisations of a family of stochastic processes, namely random dot-product graph models. These models provide an ideal extension of food-web models beyond the limitations of current deterministic or partially probabilistic models. As an additional benefit, our RDPG framework enables us to identify the pairwise distance structure given by species’ functional food-web traits: this allows for the natural emergence of ecologically meaningful species groups. Lastly, our results suggest the notion that the evolutionary signature in food webs is already detectable in their stochastic backbones, while the contribution of their fine wiring is arguable.

##Content of Repository All the R code used for the paper is in "Code" and the raw data in "Data". I am currently working to transform the code in something more nice and pretty, but for the moment is offered as it is. If you have any question about how to us it, please do not hesitate to ask!

##Citation:

@article{dalla2015exploring,
  title={Exploring the evolutionary signature of food webs’ backbones using functional traits},
  author={Dalla Riva, Giulio V and Stouffer, Daniel B},
  journal={Oikos},
  year={2015},
  publisher={Wiley Online Library}
}