Many empirical food webs contain multiple resources, which can lead to the emergence of sub-communities—partitions—in a food web that are weakly connected with each other. These partitions interact and affect the complete food web. However, the fact …
Predicting the arrival of alien species remains a big challenge, which is assumed to be a consequence of the complexity of the invasion process. Here, we demonstrate that spreading of alien marine species can be predicted by a simple model using only global shipping intensities, environmental variables, and species occurrence data. We provide species lists of the next potentially invading species in a local habitat or species causing harmful algal blooms with their associated probability of invasion. This will help to improve mitigation strategies to reduce the further introduction of alien species. Although this study focuses on marine algae, the model approach can be easily adopted to other taxonomic groups and their respective drivers of invasion
The analysis of small recurrent substructures, so called network motifs, has become a standard tool of complex network science to unveil the design principles underlying the structure of empirical networks. In many natural systems network nodes are …
The rate of biological invasions has strongly increased during the last decades, mostly due to the accelerated spread of species by increasing global trade and transport. Here, we combine the network of global cargo ship movements with port environmental conditions and biogeography to quantify the probability of new primary invasions through the release of ballast water...
Transportation networks play a crucial role in human mobility, the exchange of goods and the spread of invasive species. With 90 per cent of world trade carried by sea, the global network of merchant ships provides one of the most important modes of …
Adaptive networks appear in many biological applications. They combine topological evolution of the network with dynamics in the network nodes. Recently, the dynamics of adaptive networks has been investigated in a number of parallel studies from …
To develop and investigate detailed mathematical models of metabolic processes is one of the primary challenges in systems biology. However, despite considerable advance in the topological analysis of metabolic networks, kinetic modeling is still …
Many real-world networks are characterized by adaptive changes in their topology depending on the state of their nodes. Here we study epidemic dynamics on an adaptive network, where the susceptibles are able to avoid contact with the infected by …