Allometric scaling of weighted food webs

Abstract

Allometric scaling is an important universal property of metabolic living systems. It also describes the self-similar branching tree-liked 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 with the universal exponent η = 1.0298 which reflects the transportation efficiency of the food webs. © 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.