Question

Explain how you can get involved in community structures

Answer 1

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In the study of complex networks, a network is said to have community structure if the nodes of the network can be easily grouped into (potentially overlapping) sets of nodes such that each set of nodes is densely connected internally. In the particular case of non-overlapping community finding, this implies that the network divides naturally into groups of nodes with dense connections internally and sparser connections between groups. But overlapping communities are also allowed. The more general definition is based on the principle that pairs of nodes are more likely to be connected if they are both members of the same community(ies), and less likely to be connected if they do not share communities. A related but different problem is community search, where the goal is to find a community that a certain vertex belongs to.

Answer 2

Introduction

Different ecological communities can be pretty different in terms of the types and numbers of species they contain. For instance, some Arctic communities include just a few species, while some tropical rainforest communities have huge numbers of species packed into each cubic meter.

One way to describe this difference is to say that the communities have different structures. Community structure is essentially the composition of a community, including the number of species in that community and their relative numbers^1

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start superscript, 1, end superscript. It can also be interpreted more broadly, to include all of the patterns of interaction between these different species^2

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start superscript, 2, end superscript. How do we measure community structure?

Two important measures ecologists use to describe the composition of a community are species richness and species diversity