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Ancient food web interactions
Article By:
Roopnarine, Peter D. Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California.
Last reviewed:2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.YB160510
A food web depicts the feeding relationships among organisms in a biological community. This is an important representation because it indicates the origins, transfer, and loss of energy from the community. It is also intimately related to the short-term persistence (survival) of species and communities in their environments, indicating whether sufficient energy is being produced to support particular types of organisms and how the community might respond to ecological disturbances (environmentally stressful events that occur over a relatively short period of time and cause substantial changes in the affected ecosystem). Food webs are therefore tools that can be used to forecast how communities will respond to disturbances in the future. See also: Biomass; Ecological communities; Ecological energetics; Ecological modeling; Environment; Food web
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