In brouwern/popcycles: What the Package Does (One Line, Title Case)

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

library(popcycles)

Example paper: [Re] Chaos in a Three-Species Food Chain

intro - real lit review

One of the most important components of an ecological community is its food web. Early models of population dynamics generally only considered interactions between two species (e.g., Canale1; Rosenzweig and MacArthur2). However, in nature, food webs wherein only two species influence the behaviour of the network are quite uncommon – most networks are far more complex [3]. Therefore, several researchers asserted that every food web study should involve at least three species in order to capture that complexity [4, 5]. At first, the core interest of food web research was in equilibrium analysis, partly based on the assumption that communities observed in nature represent a stable equilibrium state [6]. However, complex dynamics arise in a system with three or more species, and these are better described as chaos rather than stable equilibrium. The simplest definition of chaos is the extreme sensitivity of a system to its initial conditions [6]. Hastings and Powell3, who studied chaos in a continuous‐time model of a food web including three species, contributed considerably to the significance and understanding of this subject. This study led to many others on food webs dynamics and chaos, which reinforced the importance of chaos in ecological modelling [7, 8]. In this article, we provide a replication of the model from Hastings and Powell3 using the same equations and parameter values. Replicating a classic study and model like this one is important for many reasons: 1) we can compare the original results with ones obtained using current technologies, ensuring that they can still be reproduced; 2) we can provide a publicly available and reproducible version of the codes that recreate the model. We were able to successfully replicate all figures in the original article using Julia v1.3.1. All code used to replicate the original model is available alongside this article (https://github.com/BIO6032/2019_replication_HastingsPowell_1991).