Exploring complex networks in the plankton
Aiming to contribute to environmental management activities and coastal ecosystems preservation, this paper presents a set of computational and methodological procedures to networks analysis of interactions between marine plankton organisms from cytometric data. As ecological interactions have dynamic character, fuzzy multigraphs were designed to capture trophic relations of competition, predation and herbivory. Complex networks indexes were applied to the topologies found revealing their structural patterns while the detection of subnetworks was made by an ant colony algorithm. The results show compliance with the literature. This approach allows access to the environmental status in a timely manner for the managerial decision making.