A species-level multi-trophic metaweb for Switzerland

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Ecological Networks
• Biodiversity Research

Background:

• Understanding species interactions is crucial for predicting ecological changes and ecosystem functioning.
• Large-scale food web studies are often limited by data gaps, necessitating reliance on modeling approaches.

Purpose of the Study:

• To construct a comprehensive, country-level trophic meta-food web for Switzerland.
• To provide an empirically-based resource for data-driven ecological network research.

Main Methods:

• Compiled literature published between 1862 and 2023 to build the metaweb.
• Catalogued 1,112,073 trophic interactions across vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants.
• Inferred additional interactions by resolving taxonomic records and considering habitat co-occurrences.

Main Results:

• Developed trophiCH, a metaweb encompassing 23,151 species and 125 feeding guilds.
• Thirty percent of species-level interactions were empirically documented.
• The metaweb serves as a foundation for exploring real-world food webs across space and time.

Conclusions:

• The trophiCH metaweb facilitates data-driven studies of ecological networks.
• This resource enables predictions of environmental change consequences, such as trophic cascades.
• Future research can integrate the metaweb with local data for broad-scale food web structure analysis.