A Unified Hypergraph- and SuperHyperGraph-Based Framework for Food Web Extension: From Classical Food Webs to SuperHyperWebs in Ecological Systems
Takaaki Fujita · 2025
Hypergraphs generalize graphs by allowing hyperedges to join any number of vertices, while superhypergraphs further extend this idea by layering iterated powersets to capture hierarchical, self-referential connections. A food web models an ecosystem as a directed graph whose nodes are species and whose edges represent predator–prey interactions. In this paper, we introduce two novel extensions of classical food webs: the Food HyperWeb, which encodes each predator’s entire prey set as a hyperedge, and the Food