Overview
- Authors:
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Joel E. Cohen
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Laboratory of Populations, Rockefeller University, New York, USA
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Frédéric Briand
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World Conservation Center, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Gland, Switzerland
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Charles M. Newman
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Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
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Table of contents (4 chapters)
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- Joel E. Cohen, Frédéric Briand
Pages 15-62
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- Joel E. Cohen, Charles M. Newman, Frédéric Briand, Zbigniew J. Palka
Pages 63-202
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- Joel E. Cohen, Frédéric Briand, Charles M. Newman
Pages 203-279
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Back Matter
Pages 281-310
About this book
Food webs hold a central place in ecology. They describe which organisms feed on which others in natural habitats. This book describes recently discovered empirical regularities in real food webs: it proposes a novel theory unifying many of these regularities, as well as extensive empirical data. After a general introduction, reviewing the empirical and theoretical discoveries about food webs, the second portion of the book shows that community food webs obey several striking phenomenological regularities. Some of these unify, regardless of habitat. Others differentiate, showing that habitat significantly influences structure. The third portion of the book presents a theoretical analysis of some of the unifying empirical regularities. The fourth portion of the book presents 113 community food webs. Collected from scattered sources and carefully edited, they are the empirical basis for the results in the volume. The largest available set of data on community food webs provides a valuable foundation for future studies of community food webs. The book is intended for graduate students, teachers and researchers primarily in ecology. The theoretical portions of the book provide materials useful to teachers of applied combinatorics, in particular, random graphs. Researchers in random graphs will find here unsolved mathematical problems.
Authors and Affiliations
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Laboratory of Populations, Rockefeller University, New York, USA
Joel E. Cohen
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World Conservation Center, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Gland, Switzerland
Frédéric Briand
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Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Charles M. Newman
