The Uncertainty and Evidence Lab was today hosted by PhD student Johanna Haussler who gave a talk on Networks on networks: modelling complex food webs on spatial networks
Biotic networks are rarely considered within a spatial context, this applies particularly to complex multitrophic communities, i.e. food webs. In my talk, I will present a novel modelling approach me and my colleagues developed, in which we applied the meta-community framework to complex food webs to understand the interplay between local feeding dynamics and species-specific dispersal dynamics at the landscape scale. Using our model, we explore how direct and indirect interactions between species in complex food webs together with spatial processes that connect sub-populations in different habitat patches interact to produce species diversity patterns in increasingly fragmented landscapes and how this interplay might modify the outcomes of fragmentation effects on biodiversity.
Three postdocs and a professor joined in and contributed to the discussion.
Afterwards we discussed the use of NetLogo and practiced presentations for the forthcoming Nordic Chapter Conference in Norway.