Unifying Ecological Subdisciplines with Ecosystem Food Webs

Abstract

Ecosystem food webs equitably depict the trophic interactions between all organisms within a spatially explicit unit of the earth. Membership and trophic interactions within ecosystem food webs are determined for explicit time periods using explicit linkage criteria. These webs are shown to be useful tools for merging ecological subdisciplines and linking species to ecosystems. This utility stems from the fact that who eats whom appears to be the most central organizing concept in ecology. Such centrality allows ecosystem food webs to integrate information from nearly all ecological subdisciplines into comprehensive portraits of ecological organization. Quantitative analysis of these portraits allows prediction of the trophic structure of populations, communities, and ecosystems. Beyond trophic interactions, ecosystem webs may be used to address other types of interactions. Such webs also emphasize explicitness, completeness, and consistency but may be based on criteria such as which organisms create habitats for each other (i.e., ecosystem engineering webs) or which organisms have mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships (i.e., ecosystem mutualism webs).