dr Janusz Szwabiński

Physics of food webs

Combining physics with ecology may seem strange at first sight. Ecology is dealing with the structure and the functioning of ecosystems. In contrast, physics is perceived as a science branch being quite successful in the description of the building blocks of matter. However, there are some similarities between these two disciplines. For instance, they both deal with systems consisting of many interacting elements and employ similar mathematical methods. As a result, interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of these two fields are more and more popular. After a short introduction into ecology, in this talk I will present some results of my recent studies on food webs and their stability.