BEFANA: A tool for biodiversity-ecosystem functioning assessment by network analysis

Martin Marzidovšek, Vid Podpečan, Erminia Conti, Marko Debeljak and Christian Mulder

Ecological Modelling, 2022, vol. 471, issue C

Abstract: BEFANA is a free and open-source software tool for ecological network analysis and visualisation. It is adapted to ecologists’ needs and allows them to study the topology and dynamics of ecological networks as well as to apply selected machine learning algorithms. BEFANA is implemented in Python, and structured as an ordered collection of interactive computational notebooks. It relies on widely used open-source libraries, and aims to achieve simplicity, interactivity, and extensibility. BEFANA provides methods and implementations for data loading and pre-processing, network analysis and interactive visualisation, modelling with experimental data, and predictive modelling with machine learning. We showcase BEFANA through a concrete example of a detrital soil food web of one agricultural grassland, and demonstrate all of its main components and functionalities.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Ecology; Ecosystem; Food web; Graph theory; Soil ecology; Machine learning; Open-source software (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:471:y:2022:i:c:s0304380022001739

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2022.110065

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