  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.
