Stefano Allesina
allesina at nceas.ucsb.edu
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
735 State St., Suite 299
Santa Barbara, CA 93101 USA
Phone: (805) 892-2029
Fax: (805) 892-2510
Reverse Engineering of Ecological Networks: From the Disassembly to the Construction of Robust Networks
Molecular biologists study how a gene works in an organism by switching it off, engineers try to replicate the functioning of a device by taking it apart and studying how its components are wired together, archaeologists reconstruct ancient machinery by examining fragments buried for centuries: these are all examples of reverse engineering. This approach is usually precluded to ecologists given the potentially dramatic consequences of disturbing ecosystems, except in mathematical models and `in silico' simulations of scenarios. I intend to study the patterns of secondary extinctions in ecological networks using mathematical and simulation models. In particular, I will try to identify which building blocks or network motifs confer robustness to ecological systems. The research on networks robustness has been so far dominated by the study of `hubs' or most connected species, and has typically included only static analyses. I will focus not only on predator-prey interactions, but also on other major constituents of ecological networks, such as parasitism, pollination and mutualism in a dynamic context, with the ultimate goal of understanding how to assemble robust networks. The `hubs' based approach will be substituted by a functional approach in which the relative importance of the components of a network is explicitly evaluated.
News
Apr 3 2008: Giulio De Leo, Antonio Bodini and I are organizing a summer school on network analysis. It will be held on June 16-20 in Parma (Italy). For more info visit the website.
Mar 26 2008: Our paper on food web stability has been reviewed for 'Faculty of 1000' by M. Holyoak: Food web theory just got really interesting again![...]
Mar 2008: Our paper on likelihoods for food webs models has been accepted in Science!
Feb 2008: New paper accepted in Ecology letters: are parasites to be included in food webs? And how?