Date of Award
1-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
College/School
College of Science and Mathematics
Department/Program
School of Computing
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Eric Forgoston
Committee Member
Youngna Choi
Committee Member
Baojun Song
Abstract
Ecologists have long been concerned with understanding the behavior and evolutionary patterns exhibited within complex ecological communities. Under- standing the delicate balance that sustains ecosystems is crucial in determining how these communities evolve over time. Recently, researchers have combined deterministic Lotka-Volterra dynamics with different types of synthetic food webs (cascade, niche and generalized cascade models), and have analyzed the mechanisms behind primary extinction events and the ensuing secondary extinction cascade. These studies also enabled the exploration of the complex interplay of species loss to explain how food web structure influences primary and secondary extinction. We have extended these ideas to real food webs by using the Ecopath modeling framework to study the dynamics of extinction in two actual marine ecosystems. The first example is a simple food web of eight functional groups from the Bay of Somme in France, while the second example is a more complicated food web of nineteen functional groups from the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Our methodology enables us to understand the extinction dynamics of different food webs, and to predict potential threats which can seriously affect the stability of real-world ecosystems.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Hernandez S., Julian A., "Deterministic and Stochastic Dynamics of Marine Food Webs" (2024). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1382.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1382