The El Verde Rainforest is located in the Caribbean National Forest in
Puerto Rico. This trophic species web
consists mostly of insects, spiders, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.
For more information on El Verde ecosystem studies, visit the El Verde Field Station
website, and see Waide and Reagan 1996.
The web
structure in the image is organized vertically, with node color
representing trophic
level. Red nodes
represent basal
species, such as plants and detritus, orange nodes represent
intermediate
species, and yellow nodes represent top species or primary predators.
Links characterize the interaction between two nodes, and the width of
the link attenuates down the trophic cascade (i.e. a link is thicker at
the predator end and thinner at the prey end).
Reference publications:
Waide, R.B. & W.B.
Reagan, eds. 1996. The Food Web of a
Tropical Rainforest. University of Chicago Press; Chicago, IL.
Dunne, J.A., R.J. Williams, and N.D. Martinez. 2002. Food-web structure and network theory: The
role of connectance and size. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, vol. 99, no. 20, pp. 12917-12922.
Dunne, J.A., R.J. Williams, and N.D. Martinez. 2002. Network structure and biodiversity loss in
food webs: robustness increases with connectance. Ecology
Letters, vol. 5, pp. 558-567.
