When is a network complex? Connectance drives degree distribution and emerging network properties
1
Department of Biology, Université du Québec à Rimouski, Rimouski, Canada
2
Québec Centre for Biodiversity Sciences, Montréal, QC, Canada
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Computational Science, Statistics
- Keywords
- ecological networks, food webs, network theory, connectance, power-law, degree distribution, niche model, null models
- Copyright
- © 2013 Poisot et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Cite this article
- 2013. When is a network complex? Connectance drives degree distribution and emerging network properties. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e50v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.50v3
Abstract
Connectance and degree distributions are important components of the structure of ecological networks. In this contribution, we use a statistical argument and simple network generating models to show that properties of the degree distribution are driven by network connectance. We discuss the consequences of this finding for (1) the generation of random networks in null-model analyses, and (2) the interpretation of network structure and ecosystem properties in relationship with degree distribution.
Author Comment
Readers are welcome to comment on this manuscript using its GitHub Issues tracking page: https://github.com/tpoisot/ms_connectance_complexity/issues