Common patterns of energy flow and biomass distribution on weighted food webs

Jiang Zhang and Yuanjing Feng

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2014, vol. 405, issue C, 278-288

Abstract: Weights of edges and nodes on food webs which are available from the empirical data hide much information about energy flows and biomass distributions in ecosystem. We define a set of variables related to weights for each species i, including the throughflow Ti, the total biomass Xi, and the dissipated flow Di (output to the environment) to uncover the following common patterns in 19 empirical weighted food webs: (1) DGBD distributions (Discrete version of a Generalized Beta Distribution), a kind of deformed Zipf’s law, of energy flow and storage biomass; (2) The allometric scaling law Ti∝Xiα, which can be viewed as the counterpart of the Kleiber’s 3/4 law at the population level; (3) The dissipation law Di∝Tiβ; and (4) The gravity law, including univariate version fij∝(TiTj)γ and bivariate approvement fij∝Tiγ1Tjγ2. These patterns are very common and significant in all collected webs, as a result, some remarkable regularities are hidden in weights.

Keywords: Weighted food webs; Energy flow distribution; Scaling relations; Allometric scaling; Gravity law; DGBD rank-ordered curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:405:y:2014:i:c:p:278-288

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2014.03.040

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