Abstract
A food web is a map that describes which kinds of organisms in a community eat which other kinds. A web helps picture how a community is put together and how it works. Although webs were often initially reported in despair at ever understanding ecological complexity, recently discovered widespread patterns in the shapes of webs, and theoretical explanations for these patterns, indicate that webs are orderly and intelligible, and have some foreseeable consequences for the dynamics of communities.
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Affiliations
The Department of Zoology and Graduate Program in Ecology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996, USA, and at the NERC Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College, SilwoodPark, Ascot, Berks SL5 7PY, UK, John H. Lawton is at the NERC Centre for Population Biology, and Joel E. Cohen is at the Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021, USA.
- Stuart L. Pimm
- , John H. Lawton
- & Joel E. Cohen
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