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Abstract
Ecological network measures are used to capture system-wide properties of ecosystems. The aim of this study is to investigate the sensitivity of flow-based ecological network measures to model perturbations. We characterize the patterns of these system-wide measure changes with respect to the network size and structural properties of the ecosystem. The method for creating a sequence of perturbations for steady-state flow modes also informs us about the minimum amount of flow data needed to build a full model that can predict certain system-wide network measures with reasonable accuracy. The results of this work improve our understanding of ecological network measures and also pose new open questions for future research.