FOOD WEBS - THEORY AND REALITY

This chapter gives an overview on Food Webs, the theory and the reality. A principal goal for ecology is to understand the nature of species interactions and to determine the extent to which they can explain the observed patterns and dynamic properties of biological communities. The most obvious interaction of all is predation. Formal presentation of the feeding links between species has often been in the form of a food web graph and these images have led some to draw an analogy between food webs and road maps. The chapter presents a brief review of patterns catalogued to date. Published food webs combine two sets of information about the community of animals and plants they represent: a list of the elements in the system, and the distribution of feeding link (information on who eats whom). The chapter also discusses food web models and concentrates on the underlying principles of these modeling approaches; Lotka-Volterra: an industry standard, model predictions and the effects of data re-evaluation, community assembly, and the cascade model. © 1993 Academic Press Limited