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Links in a food-web illustrate direct trophic relations among species, but there are also indirect effects that can alter the abundance, distribution, or biomass in the trophic levels. For example, predators eating herbivores indirectly influence the control and regulation of primary production in plants.
The trophic level of an organism is the position it occupies in a food web. Within a food web, a food chain is a succession of organisms that eat other organisms and may, in turn, be eaten themselves. The trophic level of an organism is the number of steps it is from the start of the chain. A food web starts at trophic level 1 with primary ...
A food chain depicts relations between species based on what they consume for energy in trophic levels, and they are most commonly quantified in length: the number of links between a trophic consumer and the base of the chain. Food chain studies play an important role in many biological studies. Food chain stability is very important for the ...
Trophic species. Species are grouped trophically on the left, however distinctions such as herbivore and predator are merely the simplest definitions. Trophic species are a scientific grouping of organisms according to their shared trophic (feeding) positions in a food web or food chain. Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of ...
A marine food web is a food web of marine life. At the base of the ocean food web are single-celled algae and other plant-like organisms known as phytoplankton. The second trophic level (primary consumers) is occupied by zooplankton which feed off the phytoplankton. Higher order consumers complete the web.
Trophic cascade. Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when a trophic level in a food web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade will occur if predators are effective enough in predation to reduce the abundance, or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next ...
In a trophic cascade, predators induce effects that cascade down food chain and affect biomass of organisms at least two links away. [10] The importance of trophic cascades and top-down control in terrestrial ecosystems is actively debated in ecology (reviewed in Shurin et al. 2006) and the issue of whether trophic cascades occur in soils is no ...
Ecological network. An ecological network is a representation of the biotic interactions in an ecosystem, in which species (nodes) are connected by pairwise interactions (links). These interactions can be trophic or symbiotic. Ecological networks are used to describe and compare the structures of real ecosystems, while network models are used ...