Effects of species extinction on ecosystems stability

Abstract

A food-web describes the feeding relations between species in the ecosystem and gives us an opportunity to model the dynamics between species. Using existing data, we try to find important species in a food-web by examining the dynamic response after removal of different species one at a time and observing the number of extinct species. This gives us a measure that estimates if an extinction of a species would greatly impact its surrounding ecosystem and possibly gives an estimate of trophic levels in the ecosystem. We also compare this measure that serves as a baseline to the other centrality measures in hope to find a good and cheap alternative.