evelynez / species-importance-in-foodweb Goto Github PK

This project simulates and analyzes the food web structure. First of all, the predator-prey structure is convereted into a directed graph, and the species are ranked by its degree. Then with the application of the Markov Chains model, we are able to find out how dominant each species is - in other words, its importance - in this food web. GoogleTM Search’s algorithm PageRankTM [3], which is a way of measuring the importance of website pages based on the number and quality of links to a page, is used the rank the importance of the species. Species with more interactions in the network should be considered more important. In the model, the importance of each species in its ecosystem is based on the number and importance of other species related to it.