‘metanetwork’: a R package dedicated to handling and representing
trophic metanetworks
Abstract
Trophic networks describe interactions between species at a given
location and time. Due to environmental changes, anthropogenic
perturbations or sampling effects, trophic networks may vary in space
and time. The collection of network time series or networks in different
sites thus constitutes a metanetwork. A crucial step toward the
understanding of those metanetworks is to build appropriate tools to
handle and represent them. We present here the R package metanetwork,
which will ease the exploration and the analysis of trophic metanetwork
datasets that are increasingly available. Our main methodological
advance consists in suitable layout algorithm for trophic networks,
which is based on trophic levels and dimension reduction of a graph
diffusion kernel. In particular, it highlights relevant features of
trophic networks (trophic levels, energetic channels). In addition, we
developed graphical tools to handle, compare and aggregate those
networks. Static and dynamic visualisation functions have been developed
to represent large networks. We apply our package workflow to several
trophic network data sets.