Edward Baskerville

The interactions between organisms in an ecosystem can be represented as a network, where nodes in the network define species and edges define interactions, for example the predator-prey relationship between lions and wildebeest and the mutualism between flowering plants and pollinators. I am interested generally in the relationships between the structure of the network and the dynamics of the constitutent biological populations, and in what these relationships mean for ecosystem stability. What species are most at risk of extinction? What patterns of interactions are most important for the maintenance of the ecosystem as a whole?

The realized network of interactions in an ecosystem is determined by the interplay of physical, biological, and evolutionary constraints alongside processes of self-organization. These processes can be explored using computational models at many levels of representation: the structure of potential interactions as determined by evolution; the assembly of species into a realized community, constrained by this network; and the interactions between individuals organisms. Useful models run the gamut from simple statistical models of network structure to complex models that incorporate the dynamic processes of both network assembly and population change.

I am currently using both kinds of models, the first in order to test hypotheses about the important factors in shaping the network structure of real food webs, the second to explore how interactions that involve the modulation of feeding links by a third species may impact stability and organization. I am also building general-purpose computational tools for statistical inference and simulation.