Abstract

1.Biodiversity loss is one of the current drivers of global change with an acute impact on community structure. Different measures and tools (e.g., simulations of extinction events) have been developed to analyze the structure of ecological systems and their stability under biodiversity loss, especially in complex settings with multiple interacting species, such as food webs. However, there remains the need for tools that enable a quick assessment of the ensuing impacts on food webs structure due to species extinction. Here, we develop an R package to explore the propagation of species extinctions through food webs, measured as secondary extinctions, according to user-defined node removal sequences. 2.In the NetworkExtinction package, we seek the integration between theory and computational simulations by developing six functions to analyze and visualize the structure and robustness of food webs represented as binary adjacency matrices. Three functions simulate the sequential extinction of species; a fourth function compares food web metrics between random and non-random extinction sequences; a fifth function visualizes the change in a given network metric along with the steps of sequential species extinction; a sixth function allows the user to fit and visualize the degree distribution of the network, fitting linear and non-linear regressions. We illustrate the package’s use and its outputs by analysing a Chilean coastal marine food web.