ENERGY FLOWS AND BIODIVERSITY IN A MODEL ECOSYSTEM

Abstract

Climate change has caught great attention. Ecological systems co-evolve with climate systems, thus, understanding the intrinsic dynamics of ecological systems is of paramount importance for exploring and predicting climate change. Food chains, as a systematic and simplistic model, have been a paradigm for investigating the long-term evolution of ecological systems in virtue of the dynamical analysis on the inter-play between the topology and the dynamical processes occurring in a food chain. We build a food chain model by considering energy exchanges among species, which is characterized by using population dynamical equations. We will compare our model with existing food chain models based on sufficiently empirical data. Our work is expected to be able to quantitatively capture and describe the interactions among species with respect to energy exchange, then deepen the understanding of ecological systems and their coevolution with climate change.