What is the minimum dimension of a niche space necessary to represent the overlaps among observed niches? This book presents a new technique for obtaining a partial answer to this elementary question about niche space. The author bases his technique on a relation between the combinatorial structure of food webs and the mathematical theory of interval graphs. Professor Cohen collects more than thirty food webs from the ecological literature and analyzes their statistical and combinatorial properties in detail. As a result, he is able to generalize: within habitats of a certain limited physical and temporal heterogeneity, the overlaps among niches, along their trophic (feeding) dimensions, can be represented in a one-dimensional niche space far more often than would be expected by chance alone and perhaps always. This compatibility has not previously been noticed. It indicates that real food webs fall in a small subset of the mathematically possible food webs. Professor Cohen discusses other apparently new features of real food webs, including the constant ratio of the number of kinds of prey to the number of kinds of predators in food webs that describe a community. In conclusion he discusses possible extensions and limitations of his results and suggests directions for future research.

This is a book of an international series on interdisciplinary topics of the Mathematical and Biological Sciences. The chapters are related to selected papers on the research themes presented at BIOMAT 2015 International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Biology which was held in the Roorkee Institute of Technology, in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India, on November 02-06, 2015. The treatment is both pedagogical and advanced in order to motivate research students to fulfill the requirements of professional practitioners. As in other volumes of this series, there are new important results on the interdisciplinary fields of mathematical and biological sciences and comprehensive reviews written by prominent scientific leaders of famous research groups.There are new results based on the state of art research in Population Dynamics, on Pattern Recognition of Biological Phenomena, the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, Computational Biology, the Dynamic and Geometric Modelling of Biological Phenomena, the Modelling of Physiological Disorders, the Optimal Control Techniques in Mathematical Modelling of Biological Phenomena, the Hydrodynamics and Elasticity of Cell Tissues and Bacterial Growth and the Mathematical Morphology of Biological Structures. All these contributions are also strongly recommended to professionals from other scientific areas aiming to work on these interdisciplinary fields.

This book synthesizes and reconciles modern and classical perspectives into a general unified theory.

Terminology, conceptual overview, biogeography, modeling.