Allometric Scaling of Weighted Food Webs

Allometric scaling is an important universal property of metabolic living systems. It also describes the self-similar branching treeliked structures in transportation networks. This paper presented a new approach to calculate the allometric scaling power law relations for arbitrary flow networks. This method can not only avoid the shortcoming of losing lots of information in the process of generating spanning trees in the conventional approaches but also can be applied to arbitrary weighted networks. The allometric scaling properties of 20 empirical weighted food webs (weights are energy fluxes) are computed according to the new approach, the power law relationships are derived

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: COMPLEX
• Authors: Jiang Zhang
• Keywords: Allometric Scaling, Allometric Scaling Power, Allometric Scaling Properties, COMPLEX 2009, Theoretical Computer Science