[3] The observed values of connectance in empirical food webs appear to be constrained by the variability of the physical environment,[4] by habitat type,[5] which will reflect on an organism's diet breadth driven by optimal foraging behaviour.
For instance there exist thirteen unique motif structures containing three species, some of these correspond to familiar interaction modules studied by population ecologists such as food chains, apparent competition, or intraguild predation.
[24] The relationship between complexity and stability can even be inverted in food webs with sufficient trophic coherence, so that increases in biodiversity would make a community more stable rather than less.
In doing so one could find that spanning trees are characterized by universal scaling relations, thereby suggesting that ecological network could be the product of an optimisation procedure.
[30][32][33][34] No consensus on the links between network nestedness and community stability in mutualistic species has however been reached among several investigations in recent years.
The nested structure of mutual networks was shown to promote the capacity of species to persist under increasingly harsh circumstances.
As circumstances become increasingly harsh, a tipping point may therefore be passed at which the populations of a large number of species may collapse simultaneously.
[36] Additional applications of ecological networks include exploration of how the community context affects pairwise interactions.
In these cases, networks of habitat patches (metapopulations) or individuals (epidemiology, social behavior), make it possible to explore the effects of spatial heterogeneity.