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Assessing the Relative Importance of Trophic Links in Food Webs

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Food Webs

Abstract

In recent years much effort has gone into the analysis of food web graphs in a search for recurrent properties—the so-called web statistics (see recent reviews by Pimm et al. (1991) and Hall and Raffaelli (1993)). The data requirements for these analyses are relatively undemanding, requiring no more than a matrix describing what eats what, but while binary representations of species interactions have proven useful for addressing some aspects of community organization, such as connectance (see Bengtsson and Martinez (this volume)), it has become increasingly clear that links vary in their dynamic importance (e.g. Paine (1980, 1992)).

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Raffaelli, D.G., Hall, S.J. (1996). Assessing the Relative Importance of Trophic Links in Food Webs. In: Polis, G.A., Winemiller, K.O. (eds) Food Webs. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7007-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-7007-3_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

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