Structural path analysis of ecosystem networks

This paper explains the application of structural path analysis (SPA), an input-output-based technique for measuring flows in ecological and linked ecological-economic networks. Previous methods of input-output flow analysis have concluded with aggregate indexes relying on the summing feature of the Leontief inverse in order to completely account for through-flows along a multitude of inter-compartmental paths. This paper shows that for most linear dissipative networks, a manageable number of paths of limited length exist that cover in the order of 99% or more of total throughflow. These paths can be conveniently extracted, enumerated and ranked using SPA. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.