Abstract
Food webs describe the flow of energy through an ecosystem. Understanding food webs can help to predict how important any given species is and how ecosystems change with the addition of a new species or the removal of an existing species. This paper indicates how teachers can challenge students to solve real world problems and, in the process, provides ways to model food webs with directed graphs and model competition by creating competition graphs . It has students consider a long standing conjecture that competition graphs derived from real food webs are interval graphs. The last section considers this sixty-year old unsolved problem and introduces the weighted model of a food web to better understand competition in an ecosystem.
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(Midge) Cozzens, M., Koirala, P. (2018). Food Webs, Competition Graphs, and a 60-Year Old Unsolved Problem. In: Hart, E., Sandefur, J. (eds) Teaching and Learning Discrete Mathematics Worldwide: Curriculum and Research. ICME-13 Monographs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70308-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70308-4_11
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