metanetwork: A R package dedicated to handling and representing trophic metanetworks

Abstract

Trophic networks describe interactions between species at a given location and time. Due to environmental changes, anthropogenic perturbations or sampling effects, trophic networks may vary in space and time. The collection of network time series or networks in different sites thus constitutes a metanetwork. We present here the R package metanetwork, which will ease the representation, the exploration and analysis of trophic metanetwork data sets that are increasingly available. Our main methodological advance consists in suitable layout algorithm for trophic networks, which is based on trophic levels and dimension reduction in a graph diffusion kernel. In particular, it highlights relevant features of trophic networks (trophic levels, energetic channels). In addition, we developed tools to handle, compare visually and quantitatively and aggregate those networks. Static and dynamic visualisation functions have been developed to represent large networks. We apply our package workflow to several trophic network data sets.