food web

Definitions

A diagram showing the organisms that eat other organisms in a particular ecosystem, predators being higher in the web than their prey; the network of interrelations that the diagram models.

Equivalents

Examples

“[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.”

CEFR level