Trophic species

Species are grouped trophically on the left, however distinctions such as herbivore and predator are merely the simplest definitions.

Trophic species are a scientific grouping of organisms according to their shared trophic (feeding) positions in a food web or food chain. Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of predators in the food web. This means that members of a trophic species share many of the same kinds of ecological functions.^[1]^[2] The idea of trophic species was first devised by Frederic Briand and Joel Cohen in 1984 when investigating scaling laws applying to food webs.^[3] The category may include species of plants, animals, a combination of plants and animals, and biological stages of an organism. When assigning groups in a trophic manner, relationships are linear in scale, which allowed the same authors to predict the proportion of different trophic links in food webs.^[4] Furthermore grouping similar species according to feeding habit rather than genetics results in a ratio of predator to prey that is generally 1:1 in food webs.^[5]

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^ Briand, F.; Cohen, J.E. (19 January 1984). "Community food webs have scale-invariant structure". Nature. 307 (5948): 264–267. Bibcode:1984Natur.307..264B. doi:10.1038/307264a0. S2CID 4319708.
^ Cohen, J. E.; Briand, F. (1984-07-01). "Trophic links of community food webs". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 81 (13): 4105–4109. Bibcode:1984PNAS...81.4105C. doi:10.1073/pnas.81.13.4105. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 345377. PMID 6588381.
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[3] Briand, F.; Cohen, J.E. (19 January 1984). "Community food webs have scale-invariant structure". Nature. 307 (5948): 264–267. Bibcode:1984Natur.307..264B. doi:10.1038/307264a0. S2CID 4319708.

[4] Cohen, J. E.; Briand, F. (1984-07-01). "Trophic links of community food webs". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 81 (13): 4105–4109. Bibcode:1984PNAS...81.4105C. doi:10.1073/pnas.81.13.4105. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 345377. PMID 6588381.

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