Community Food Webs

Community food webs describe the feeding relationships, or trophic interactions, between species in an ecological community. Food webs can be represented both pictorially and mathematically. Historically, the mathematical study of community food webs developed from two different lines of inquiry. The first line extended the predator–prey models of Lotka and Volterra to describe the dynamics of communities of many species. The second line derived from the study of the flows of energy in ecosystems, beginning with Lindeman. Ecologists studying the dynamics, and researchers focusing on the energy flows of community food webs found it useful to model food webs with sets of differential equations, one equation for each species (or ‘trophospecies’, aggregations of species sharing the same prey and predators) in the system.

References

1 Berryman, A.A. (1992). The origins and evolution of predator–prey theory, Ecology 73, 1530–1573.
10.2307/1940005
Web of Science® Google Scholar
2 Carpenter, S.R. & Kitchell, J.F. (1984). Consumer control of lake productivity, BioScience 38, 764–769.
10.2307/1310785
Web of Science® Google Scholar
3 Cohen, J.E., Briand, F. & Newman, C.M. (1990). Community Food Webs: Data and Theory, Springer-Verlag, New York.
10.1007/978-3-642-83784-5
Google Scholar
4 Hairston, N.G. Jr & Hairston, N.G. Sr (1993). Cause–effect relationships in energy flow, trophic structure, and interspecific interactions, The American Naturalist 142, 379–411.
10.1086/285546
Web of Science® Google Scholar
5 Lindeman, R.L. (1942). The trophic–dynamic aspect of ecology, Ecology 23, 399–418.
10.2307/1930126
CAS Google Scholar
6 Lotka, A.J. (1925). Elements of Physical Biology, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore.
Web of Science® Google Scholar
7 May, R.M. (1972). Will a large complex system be stable?, Nature 238, 413–414.
10.1038/238413a0
CAS PubMed Web of Science® Google Scholar
8 Menge, B.A. (1995). Indirect effects in marine intertidal interaction webs: patterns and importance, Ecological Monographs 65, 21–74.
10.2307/2937158
Web of Science® Google Scholar
9 Morin, P.J. & Lawler, S.P. (1996). Effects of food chain length and omnivory on population dynamics in experimental food webs, in Food Webs: Integration of Patterns and Dynamics, G.A. Polis & K.O. Winemiller, eds, Chapman & Hall, New York, pp. 218–230.
10.1007/978-1-4615-7007-3_22
Google Scholar
10 Paine, R.T. (1966). Food web complexity and species diversity, The American Naturalist 100, 65–75.
10.1086/282400
Web of Science® Google Scholar
11 Paine, R.T. (1988). Food webs: Road maps of interactions or grist for theoretical development, Ecology 69, 1648–1654.
10.2307/1941141
Web of Science® Google Scholar
12 Pimm, S.L. (1982). Food Webs, Chapman & Hall, London.
10.1007/978-94-009-5925-5
Google Scholar
13 Polis, G.A. (1991). Complex trophic interactions in deserts: An empirical critique of food-web theory, The American Naturalist 138, 123–155.
10.1086/285208
Web of Science® Google Scholar
14 Volterra, V. (1926). Fluctuations in the abundance of species, considered mathematically, Nature 118, 558–560.
10.1038/118558a0
Web of Science® Google Scholar
15 Winemiller, K.O. (1990). Spatial and temporal variation in tropical fish trophic networks, Ecological Monographs 60, 331–367.
10.2307/1943061
Web of Science® Google Scholar

Encyclopedia of Environmetrics

Browse other articles of this reference work: