Community food webs have scale-invariant structure
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.
- Publication:
-
Nature
- Pub Date:
- January 1984
- DOI:
- Bibcode:
- 1984Natur.307..264B