BEFANA: A Tool for Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning Assessment by Network Analysis
This provides ecologists with a specialized tool for biodiversity-ecosystem functioning analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing libraries and methods.
The researchers developed BEFANA, a free open-source software tool for ecological network analysis and visualization tailored to ecologists' needs, which enables studying network topology/dynamics and applying machine learning algorithms through interactive Python notebooks.
BEFANA is a free and open-source software tool for ecological network analysis and visualisation. It is adapted to ecologists' needs and allows them to study the topology and dynamics of ecological networks as well as apply selected machine learning algorithms. BEFANA is implemented in Python, and structured as an ordered collection of interactive computational notebooks. It relies on widely used open-source libraries, and aims to achieve simplicity, interactivity, and extensibility. BEFANA provides methods and implementations for data loading and preprocessing, network analysis and interactive visualisation, modelling with experimental data, and predictive modelling with machine learning. We showcase BEFANA through a concrete example of a detrital soil food web of agricultural grasslands, and demonstrate all of its main components and functionalities.