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Food Webs

  • Reference work entry
Computational Complexity

Article Outline

Glossary

Definition of the Subject

Introduction: Food Web Concepts and Data

Early Food Web Structure Research

Food Web Properties

Food Webs Compared to Other Networks

Models of Food Web Structure

Structural Robustness of Food Webs

Food Web Dynamics

Ecological Networks

Future Directions

Bibliography

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Abbreviations

Connectance(C):

The proportion of possible links in a food web that actually occur. There are many algorithms for calculating connectance. The simplest and most widely used algorithm, sometimes referred to as “directed connectance,” is links per species2 \( { (L/S^{2}) } \), where S 2 represents all possible directed feeding interactions among S species, and L is the total number of actual feeding links. Connectance ranges from ∼ 0.03 to 0.3 in food webs, with a mean of ∼ 0.10 to 0.15.

Consumer-resource interactions:

A generic way of referring to a wide variety of feeding interactions, such as predator‐prey, herbivore‐plant or parasite‐host interactions. Similarly, “consumer” refers generically to anything that consumes or preys on something else, and “resource” refers to anything that is consumed or preyed upon. Many taxa are both consumers and resources within a particular food web.

Food web:

The network of feeding interactions among diverse co‐occurring species in a particular habitat.

Trophic species (S):

Defined within the context of a particular food web, a trophic species is comprised of a set of taxa that share the same set of consumers and resources. A particular trophic species is represented by a single node in the network, and that node is topologically distinct from all other nodes. “Trophic species” is a convention introduced to minimize bias due to uneven resolution in food web data and to focus analysis and modeling on functionally distinct network components. S is used to denote the number of trophic species in a food web. The terms “trophic species,” “species,” and “taxa” will be used somewhat interchangeably throughout this article to refer to nodes in a food web. “Original species” will be used specifically to denote the taxa found in the original dataset, prior to trophic species aggregation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, USA

    Jennifer A. Dunne

  2. Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab, Berkeley, USA

    Jennifer A. Dunne

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  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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Dunne, J.A. (2012). Food Webs. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Computational Complexity. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1800-9_72

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