A food web (or food cycle) is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation (usually an image) of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Food-web theory can be a powerful guide to the management of complex ecosystems. Food web ecology is a constantly evolving subdiscipline of ecology, and it is important to appreciate the diversity of approaches to the study of food webs (Schoener 1989; …
Food webs are highly complex ecological networks, dynamic in both space and time. Early analyses of topological properties of empirical food webs emerged from research on ecological diversity–stability relationships (e.g., refs.
Classical macrodescriptors and recent network metrics are evaluated for each marine food web example. Another name for food web is consumer-resource system . This chapter examines recent case studies of marine food webs to evaluate the applicability of food web theories for the marine environment. Metacommunity models are now at the core of unified theories of biodiversity, but to date they have not addressed food web complexity. Although food web studies have long been central to ecological research (1–3), there has been controversy over whether there are regularities in food-web structure worth explaining . Here we show that metacommunity theory can explain the emergence of species-rich food webs with complex network topologies. However, we show that indices of species importance common in food-web and network theory …