Major milestone for our project now published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution:
5 OCTOBER 2022
Our article Fluctuating ecological networks: A synthesis of maximum-entropy approaches for pattern detection and process inference is now published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution:
(opens in a new window)https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.13985
This paper is fundamentally a review in which we also revise some key concepts of ecological null models applied to the study of networks. The content of the article is both very theoretical and applied, with practical implementations already available in open source software. At a theoretical level, when we try to reconstruct a network, the major question we ask is: how much information, and how many details are really needed to reconstruct the high level structural properties that characterise a network? Maximum entropy approaches from statistical mechanics are ideal to answer this question, and provide ecologists with a whole new set of modelling tools that in our view allow the construction of null models that best suit the high heterogeneity of ecological systems.