Sugihara G, Schoenly K, Trombla A
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093.
Science. 1989 Jul 7;245(4913):48-52. doi: 10.1126/science.2740915.
The robustness of five common food web properties is examined by varying the resolution of the data through aggregation of trophic groupings. A surprising constancy in each of these properties is revealed as webs are collapsed down to approximately half their original size. This analysis of 60 invertebrate-dominated community food webs confirms the existence of all but one of these properties in such webs and addresses a common concern held by critics of food web theory that observed food web properties may be sensitive to trophic aggregation. The food web statistics (chain length; predator/prey ratio; fraction of top, intermediate, and bottom species; and rigid circuits) are scaling in the sense that they remain roughly invariant over a wide range of data resolution. As such, within present standards of reporting food web data, these statistics may be used to compare systems whose trophic data are resolved differently within a factor of 2.
通过对营养组进行汇总来改变数据分辨率，从而检验了五种常见食物网属性的稳健性。当食物网收缩至其原始大小的约一半时，这些属性中的每一个都呈现出惊人的稳定性。对60个以无脊椎动物为主导的群落食物网的分析证实了这些食物网中除一种属性外其他所有属性的存在，并回应了食物网理论批评者的一个共同担忧，即观察到的食物网属性可能对营养汇总敏感。食物网统计数据（链长、捕食者/猎物比率、顶级、中级和底层物种的比例以及刚性回路）具有尺度不变性，因为它们在广泛的数据分辨率范围内大致保持不变。因此，在目前报告食物网数据的标准范围内，这些统计数据可用于比较营养数据分辨率相差不超过两倍的不同系统。
