[T]he dynamic nature of rivers that flow westward from the peninsular range of San Diego county has been altered by man. […] Human modifications tend to alter the habitat values, water quality, flow regimes, and most importantly the food web by changing the trophic structure.

No species exists in a vacuum. Rather, each species is embedded within a network of predator-prey interactions in what Charles Darwin referred to as an “entangled bank” and is now known in the most general sense as a food web. In its most basic form, a food web reveals to us something about the feeding relationships in a system. More broadly, food webs represent a way of thinking about an ecological system that considers trophic (consumer-resource) interactions among species or groups of similar species (trophic guilds or trophic levels).

Food web structure can be closely tied to biodiversity, with certain structural attributes such as 'connectance' (the proportion of potential interactions between species that are actually realised) being generally related to the number of species in the food web[…]. Thus, agricultural management may affect food web structure indirectly by altering local biodiversity.

In plant-dominated ecosystems the composition of the belowground foodweb shifts to a bacterial pathway when the source of organic matter is more labile, and to a fungal-dominated foodweb when the organic matter is more complex and recalcitrant.

Food web

Meaning

Noun

Synonyms