In the run-up to the recent financial crisis, an increasingly elaborate set of financial
instruments emerged, intended to optimize returns to individual institutions with seemingly …

The global biodiversity crisis concerns not only unprecedented loss of species within
communities, but also related consequences for ecosystem function. Community ecology …

Community ecology is tasked with the considerable challenge of predicting the structure,
and properties, of emerging ecosystems. It requires the ability to understand how and why …

It has recently been noted that empirical food webs are significantly compartmentalized; that
is, subsets of species exist that interact more frequently among themselves than with other …

Darwin used the metaphor of a 'tangled bank'to describe the complex interactions between
species. Those interactions are varied: they can be antagonistic ones involving predation …

A variety of different social, natural and technological systems can be described by the same
mathematical framework. This holds from the Internet to food webs and to boards of …

Parasitism is the most common consumer strategy among organisms, yet only recently has
there been a call for the inclusion of infectious disease agents in food webs. The value of …

Classic local stability theory predicts that complex ecological networks are unstable and are
unlikely to persist despite empiricists' abundant documentation of such complexity in nature …

Comparative research on food web structure has revealed generalities in trophic
organization, produced simple models, and allowed assessment of robustness to species …

Understanding what structures ecological communities is vital to answering questions about
extinctions, environmental change, trophic cascades, and ecosystem functioning. Optimal …