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Project properties |
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| Title | Big fish eat little fish: modelling changes in the structure of ecosystem food webs |
| Group | Mathematical and Statistical Methods Group |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | Up to 39 |
| Supervisor(s) | Romain Frelat |
| Examiner(s) | Lia Hemerik |
| Contact info | romain.frelat@wur.nl |
| Begin date | 2020/10/01 |
| End date | 2022/10/01 |
| Description | Ecological communities are constantly being reshaped due to fast environmental changes and strong anthropogenic pressures. Yet, we do not know how food webs will restructure, limiting the capacity of prediction at the basis of scientific advice for ecosystem-based management.
Marine food webs are hard to (re)construct because data on observation of species and their diet are lacking. Additionally, traditional food webs don’t capture the changes of diet that occur in the course of an organism’s life, a frequent phenomenon among marine taxa. Recently, promising approaches were developed to predict trophic interactions based on the size of predators and preys which may help building trophic networks at local scale sensitive to the ontogenetic diet shift explained above. The objective of the thesis is twofold: 1) implement a method to predict trophic interactions based on fish body size, and test its validity on the North Sea; ii) measure changes in the structure of food webs using ecological network analysis and long-term monitoring data. Please note: 1) topic for MSc thesis 2) begin date and end date are open |
| Used skills | This work will combine:
1) handling and exploration of large datasets, 2) introduction to ecological network analysis and properties of graph theory, 3) optionally, spatial analysis and introduction to GIS |
| Requirements | Good knowledge of R
Interest in network analysis, (optional) experience or interest in spatial analysis and GIS. |