Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Incorporating Demographic Structure And Variable Interaction Types Into Community Assembly Models, Akhil Reddy Alasandagutti, Nayan Chawla

Honors Theses

Theoretical studies of ecological food webs have allowed ecologists to remove the constraints of specific location and timescales from their study of ecological communities; food webs are generally complex and thus empirical study is difficult. Further, this theoretical approach allows ecologists to compare ecological processes and outcomes across any possible food web structures. However, these simulated communities are only as useful as the model from which they were constructed. Modifying existing considerations in these models, and generating new ones, are the jobs of theoretical ecologists that seek to achieve the shared goal of a majority of simulations: representation of real …