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Letters to Nature
Nature 307, 264-267 (19 January 1984) | doi:10.1038/307264a0; Accepted 25 October 1983
Community food webs have scale-invariant structure
Frédéric Briand* & Joel E. Cohen†
- *University of Ottawa, Department of Biology, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5
- †The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, New York 10021, USA
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Abstract
We have analysed 62 community food webs drawn from published studies and have found a remarkable regularity in ecosystem structure: in biological communities, the proportions of top, intermediate and basal species are, on average, independent of the total number of species. Hence, there is a direct proportionality between the numbers of prey and predators.
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