2008/08/21 by Craig R. Powell, Alan J. McKane, Powell, Craig R. +1
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Agricultural Innovations and Practices #FOS: Biological sciences #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0808.2922
openalex publication_date 2008/08/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present results contrasting food webs constructed using the same model where the source of species was either evolution or immigration from a previously evolved species pool. The overall structure of the webs are remarkably similar, although we find some important differences which mainly relate to the percentage of basal and top species. Food webs assembled from evolved webs also show distinct plateaux in the number of tropic levels as the resources available to system increase, in contrast to evolved webs. By equating the resources available to basal species to area, we are able to examine the species-area curve created by each process separately. They are found to correspond to different regimes of the tri-phasic species-area curve.