Weighted Food Webs Make Computing Phylogenetic Diversity So Much Harder

Jannik Schestag

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arXiv · 2510.05911

Weighted Food Webs Make Computing Phylogenetic Diversity So Much Harder

Jannik Schestag

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Abstract

Phylogenetic trees represent certain species and their likely ancestors. In such a tree, present-day species are leaves and an edge from u to v indicates that u is an ancestor of v. Weights on these edges indicate the phylogenetic distance. The phylogenetic diversity (PD) of a set of species A is the total weight of edges that are on any path between the root of the phylogenetic tree and a species in A. Selecting a small set of species that maximizes phylogenetic diversity for a given phylogenetic tree is an essential task in preservation planning, where limited resources naturally prevent saving all species. An optimal solution can be found with a greedy algorithm [Steel, Systematic Biology, 2005; Pardi and Goldman, PLoS Genetics, 2005]. However, when a food web representing predator-prey relationships is given, finding a set of species that optimizes phylogenetic diversity subject to the condition that each saved species should be able to find food among the preserved species is NP-hard [Spillner et al., IEEE/ACM, 2008]. We present a generalization of this problem, where, inspired by biological considerations, the food web has weighted edges to represent the importance of predator-prey relationships. We show that this version is NP-hard even when both structures, the food web and the phylogenetic tree, are stars. To cope with this intractability, we proceed in two directions. Firstly, we study special cases where a species can only survive if a given fraction of its prey is preserved. Secondly, we analyze these problems through the lens of parameterized complexity. Our results include that finding a solution is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the vertex cover number of the food web, assuming the phylogenetic tree is a star.

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Jannik Schestag. 2025-10-07. Weighted Food Webs Make Computing Phylogenetic Diversity So Much Harder. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05911

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