Evolving complex food webs

We describe the properties of a model which links the ecology of food web structure with the evolutionary dynamics of speciation and extinction events; the model describes the dynamics of ecological communities on an evolutionary timescale. Species are defined as sets of characteristic features, and these features are used to determine interaction scores between species. A realistic population dynamics, which incorporates these scores, is used to determine the changes in population sizes on ecological time scales and so determine mean population sizes. We display typical examples of food webs constructed using the model and comment on the good agreement which is found between the model predictions and data on real webs.