Food Webs: Insights from a General Ecosystem Model

Food webs have been intensively studied throughout modern ecology, using empirical evidence, statistics and modelling tools to search for consistent patterns, underlying commonalities, and variations between food webs and ecosystems. However, with few exceptions, the modelling approaches have not been based on the emergent properties of complex simulated ecosystems. For the same reason, there have also been few studies of ‘sampling the model’, in which different levels of sampling effort are imposed in a controlled simulated environment to explore the effects of varying sampling intensity in order to relate those back to empirical observations. Here, we introduce the Madingley Model, a general ecosystem model based on ecological and biological first principles of interactions between individuals, as a potential tool for analyzing food webs. In doing so, we present the first insights of the analyses of emergent Madingley food web networks. We describe the basic structure of these networks and introduce a process to aggregate and sample the food webs produced by this model so that it can be compared to empirical food web studies. We show that food webs created by this model reasonably reproduce the properties of empirical food web networks. Furthermore, we provide insights about the effects of species aggregation and sampling on the observed structure of empirically documented food webs.