Food Webs and Biodiversity : Foundations, Models, Data

Food Webs and Biodiversity provides a timely synthesis of community ecology that evaluates the strengths and limitations of current food web theories and provides a fresh, new comprehensive numerical model for evaluating community structure and evolution.

The book develops the argument that food webs will often be the key to understanding the mechanisms that control patterns of biodiversity at the community level, in particular species richness, that is, the total number of species co-existing in a community.

With concerns over global warming, understanding and protecting biodiversity is a cause of international concern and this highly topical  book will be of interest to a wide ranging audience including; graduate students and practitioners in community ecology and conservation ecology as well as the complex-systems research community; mathematicians and physicists interested in the theory of networks.