Abstract
Cooccurring species within a community interact in various ways and to varying degrees. Interactions can be direct, involving physical contact, or indirect, with no physical contact. Direct interactions include competition, the contest among species for acquisition of limited shared resources, predation, the nonspecific consumption of prey, and symbiosis, intimate interactions between pairs of species, including parasitism, internal or external feeding on a living host, commensalism, nonconsumptive support or transportation by the host, and mutualism, in which both species benefit through sharing of resources or services. Indirect interactions include reduced herbivory through plant attraction of predators, reduced prey competition through predation on the most abundant competing species and reduced herbivory through nonconsumptive effects of herbivore fear of predator presence. Food web interactions can be modeled as direct and indirect linkages that vary in interaction strength, depending on the frequency of interactions.
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