Polis, G. A., M. E. Power, and G. R. Huxel, editors. 2004. Food Webs at the Landscape Level. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Abstract

Precisely as stated in the title, Food Webs at the Landscape Level is about the integration of two major fields of ecology: food web ecology and landscape ecology. The chapters by many authors examine all types of ecosystems, with particular emphasis on how processes that occur among trophic groups are linked with processes that occur at the landscape level. Consequently, it is also a book about scale and how ecologists might begin to consider that parts of food webs can often operate at very different scales. For example, some communities depend on basal resources that originate from places that are different from those in which the focal food web is located, e.g., inputs of nutrients to lakes from the watershed or output of insect prey from rivers to land predators. Other food webs experience occasional inputs of individuals from a higher trophic level because these predatory populations operate at a larger spatial scale than do other members of the food web. With this timely book, ecologists are finally starting to address the fact that food webs are not static in space or time and that what we used to ignore as "transient" species may actually be playing very important functional roles