Using dominator trees to catch secondary extinctions in action

In ecosystems a single extinction event could eventually precipitate in a mass extinction, involving species that may be several connections away from the target of the perturbation. To forecast the effects of a species' removal one can use an algorithm that unfolds a complex food web into a topologically simpler scheme, called dominator tree. This structure has revealed simple, elegant, and highly informative. Aim of this research is to test the dominator tree model in cases where secondary extinction has been observed in nature.