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University of Nebraska - Lincoln

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

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2001

Niche

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Notes And Comments: Food Web Laws Or Niche Theory? Six Independent Empirical Tests, Kirk O. Winemiller, Eric R. Pianka, Laurie J. Vitt, Anthony Joern Jan 2001

Notes And Comments: Food Web Laws Or Niche Theory? Six Independent Empirical Tests, Kirk O. Winemiller, Eric R. Pianka, Laurie J. Vitt, Anthony Joern

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Over the past 2 decades, empirical food webs have been shown to possess regular patterns of various kinds. Some of the first food web patterns were reported as “food web laws,” the most notable being the link-species scaling law. This empirically derived law described an inverse relationship between community species richness and web connectance (Cohen and Briand 1984; Cohen and Newman 1985). Subsequent evaluation of food webs constructed with more detailed data falsified (Warren 1989; Winemiller 1989a, 1990; Hall and Raffaelli 1991; Polis 1991) and modified (Warren 1990; Martinez 1991, 1992; Pimm et al. 1991; Martinez et al. 1999) many …