Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity.

By R. Thompson, U. Brose, Jennifer A. Dunne, R. O. Hall, S. Hladyz, R. Kitching, Neo D. Martinez, H. Rantala, T. Romanuk, Daniel B. Stouffer and 1 more. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2012

652 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The global biodiversity crisis concerns not only unprecedented loss of species within communities, but also related consequences for ecosystem function. Community ecology focuses on patterns of species richness and community composition, whereas ecosystem ecology focuses on fluxes of energy and materials. Food webs provide a quantitative framework to combine these approaches and unify the study of biodiversity and ecosystem function. We summarise the progression of food-web ecology and the challenges in using the food-web approach. We identify five areas of research where these advances can continue, and be applied to global challenges. Finally, we describe what data are needed in the next generation of food-web studies to reconcile the structure and function of biodiversity.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64950aef55a3d2ee9f2b5722e7a2979cf6ceb5f6

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Citations in the corpus

Towards ecosystem-based management: identifying operational food-web indicators for marine ecosystems (2017, background): “Food-web ecology is a rapidly advancing science with new and emerging information and methods (Thompson et al., 2012; Link et al., 2015; Longo et al., 2015).”
Merging DNA metabarcoding and ecological network analysis to understand and build resilient terrestrial ecosystems (2016, background): “138 Advances in ecological network analysis (ENA) 139 Ecological networks are a powerful framework for assessing ecosystem organization, dynamics, 140 stability and function (Montoya, Pimm & Solé 2006; Bascompte 2009; Thompson et al. 2012).”
Analysing ecological networks of species interactions (2018, background): “, 2007), or by analysing the statistical correlation between an ecosystem property and species functional roles (Thompson et al., 2012).”
Resolving Food-Web Structure (2020, background): “But it does not necessarily follow that “food-web structure is well described” (Thompson et al. 2012, p. 695).”
From regional to global patterns in vertebrate scavenger communities subsidized by big game hunting (2015, methodology): “Similar to food web research (Thompson et al., 2012), we analysed the structure of the scavenger community according to three different degrees of aggregation of biological species (hereafter scavenger groups), based on species taxonomy, body mass and main trophic habits (Table S2).”