  In this work we analyse the topological and dynamical properties of a simple
model of complex food webs, namely the niche model. In order to underline
competition among species, we introduce "prey" and "predators" weighted overlap
graphs derived from the niche model and compare synthetic food webs with real
data. Doing so, we find new tests for the goodness of synthetic food web models
and indicate a possible direction of improvement for existing ones. We then
exploit the weighted overlap graphs to define a competition kernel for
Lotka-Volterra population dynamics and find that for such a model the stability
of food webs decreases with its ecological complexity.
