Energetic Food Webs An analysis of real and model ecosystems

by Moore, John C.; de Ruiter, Peter C.

• ISBN13: 9780198566199
• ISBN10: 0198566190
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-26
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In ecosystems with many species, food webs form highly complex networks of resource-consumer interactions. At the same time, the food web as itself needs sufficient resources to develop and survive. So in fact, food web ecology is about how natural resources form the basis of biological communities, in terms of species richness and abundances as well as how species are organised in communities on the basis of the resource availability and use. The central theme of this book is that patterns in the utilisation of energy result from the trophic interactions among species, and that these patterns form the basis of ecosystem stability.

The authors integrate the latest work on community dynamics, ecosystem energetics, and stability, and in so doing attempt to dispel the categorisation of the field into the separate subdisciplines of population, community, and ecosystem ecology. Energetic Food Webs represents the first attempt to bridge the gap between the energetic and species approaches to ecology.

Table of Contents

Approaches to studying food webs

Modelling Simple and Multispecies Communities

Models of Simple and Complex Systems

Connectedness Food Webs

Energy Flux Food Webs

Functional webs

The Dynamics and Stability of Simple and Complex Communities

Energetic Organization and Food Web Stability

Enrichment, Trophic Structure, and Dynamic Stability

Modeling Compartments

Productivity, Dynamic Stability, and Species Richness

Dynamic Food Web Architectures

Species-based versus Biomass-based Food Web Descriptions

Dynamic Architectures and Stability of Complex Systems along Productivity Gradients

Food Webs Dynamics Beyond Asymptotic Behavior

References

Index

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