A topological similarity‐based bootstrapping method for inferring food web parameters

Abstract

A food web is a representation of trophic interactions in an ecosystem. Food webs are often generated by a single dataset aggregated from one or several surveys. Point estimates of food web parameters can be calculated from the data, but it remains an open question as to how their corresponding interval estimates can be quantified. Although conventional methods such as bootstrapping represent potential solutions, they tend to underestimate several network parameters. Here, we propose a simple bootstrap‐based resampling procedure for inferring food web parameters. First, for a particular food web parameter, we obtain its point estimate by calculating the corresponding statistics from the original food web. Second, we generate a resampled food web by sampling with replacement the same number of species from the original food web, and for each resampled species we record how many prey items it consumes in the original food web. Third, a resampled species is allowed to consume its original prey species if such a species is also present; if not present, it instead consumes the resampled species that is most topologically similar to its original prey species. Many resampled food webs can be generated in this manner, and we calculate particular food web statistics for each of them. These form a sampling distribution from which interval estimates of the true food web parameter can be determined. We demonstrate our methodology on two different food web datasets and discuss its application in comparing food webs of various sizes and connectance.

Pattern of seasonal variation in rates of predation between spider families is temporally stable in a food web with widespread intraguild predation

“…Median values for years and seasons ranged from 0.22 to 0.27, which are ~70% of the value for the summary web. Lower values reflect the fact that subsets of the full data matrix were selected for bootstrapping [ 40 ].…”

“…~70% of the value for the summary web. Lower values reflect the fact that subsets of the full data matrix were selected for bootstrapping [40].…”

Will the Structure of Food Imports Improve China’s Water-Intensive Food Cultivation Structure? A Spatial Econometric Analysis

“…If there is a non-linear relationship between the SEFI and the WFCS, the regression result of the model will produce certain errors. Thus, the robustness of the baseline model is tested using non-parametric bootstrap estimation (1000 extractions) [26]. The result of the non-parametric estimation model test is shown in column (4) of Table 3.…”

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“…This often boosts our understanding [e.g., unified theory of biodiversity (Hubbell 2001), originally from the neutral theory of molecular evolution (Kimura 1968); evolutionary game theory (Smith 1974) that was developed from game theory in mathematics and economics (Nash 1950)]. We need positive attitudes to fill the gaps between scientists in diverse fields of academics (e.g., Liu et al 2017). Sharing data is a growing trend in ecological sciences and other fields.…”