Interaction strengths in food webs: issues and opportunities

Summary Recent efforts to understand how the patterning of interaction strength affects both structure and dynamics in food webs have highlighted several obstacles to productive synthesis. Issues arise with respect to goals and driving questions, methods and approaches, and placing results in the context of broader ecological theory. Much confusion stems from lack of clarity about whether the questions posed relate to community‐level patterns or to species dynamics, and to what authors actually mean by the term ‘interaction strength’. Here, we describe the various ways in which this term has been applied and discuss the implications of loose terminology and definition for the development of this field. Of…

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  European Science Foundation