ABSTRACT
The food-web concept is an important subset of trophic ecology because food webs serve as the mechanisms by which trophic interactions are transmitted among organisms and the environment. Food webs are networks within ecosystems that have quantifiable characteristics such as topologies, connectedness, linkage density, interaction strength, and size (e.g., food chain length). Many books have been written by biologists and mathematics on characterizing, categorizing, and predicting food webs (Pimm 1982; Belgrano et al. 2005; Pascual and Dunne 2006; Moore and de Ruiter 2012). Online databases of food webs exist, most notably https://www .foodwebs.org, to construct and study them. This chapter is intended to summarize the basics for navigating food-web ecology and explore some basic generalizations where they exist. Ecological network analysis is a tool that has arisen. We will find that in the past several decades, there has been a strong push, with mixed success, to determine whether properties emerge from food webs based on their inherent topologies.
