Models of biomass size spectra assume that organisms with higher body mass feed at higher trophic levels, but explicit empirical tests of this pattern are rare. We used nitrogen stable isotopes (δ15N) as an index of the trophic level in a benthic fish and invertebrate size-spectrum, and demonstrated that body mass was positively and significantly related to trophic level. This pattern was consi...

Abstract Marine capture fisheries in the U.S. are important from a societal, cultural, economic, and ecological perspective. Although generally well-managed, they still face some challenges as do most around world. To address these challenges, broader, more systematic approach is useful. There global need to develop measures of ecosystem overfishing (EOF) that detect an entire using readily ava...

Food webs are known to have myriad trophic links between resource and consumer species. While herbivores have well-understood trophic tendencies, the difficulties associated with characterizing the trophic positions of higher-order consumers have remained a major problem in food web ecology. To better understand trophic linkages in food webs, analysis of the stable nitrogen isotopic composition...

The ability to quantitatively assess ecological health is of great interest to those tasked with monitoring and conserving ecosystems. For decades, biomonitoring research and policies have relied on multimetric health indices of various forms. Although indices are numbers, many are constructed based on qualitative procedures, thus limiting the quantitative rigor of the practical interpretations...

Individual and trophic efficiencies of size-structured communities are derived from mechanistically based principles at the individual level. The derivations are relevant for communities with a size-based trophic structure, i.e. where trophic level is strongly correlated with individual size as in many aquatic systems. The derivations are used to link Lindeman's trophic theory and trophic theor...

The study was conducted in Karasu Stream (Sinop Province, Black Sea Region of Turkey). purpose this is, to determine the benthic macroinvertebrate composition stream, together with some its environmental characteristics (water temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen) evaluate trophic level stream. Samplings macroinvertebrates variables were performed monthly at ten stations between February 2013 J...

Trophic rewilding is an ecological restoration strategy that uses species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions and associated trophic cascades to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems. Given the importance of large animals in trophic cascades and their widespread losses and resulting trophic downgrading, it often focuses on restoring functional megafaunas. Trophic rewi...

Trophic assimilation efficiency (conversion of resource biomass into consumer biomass) is thought to be a limiting factor for food chain length in natural communities. In host-parasitoid systems, which account for the majority of terrestrial consumer interactions, a high trophic assimilation efficiency may be expected at higher trophic levels because of the close match of resource composition o...

We compared several large marine ecosystems in terms of species numbers of fishes, sea birds, marine mammals, and cephalopods. We examined how these numbers were distributed by trophic level, from herbivores to top predators. We created group-specific trophic signatures as plots of number of species by trophic level, and used these to identify similarities and discrepancies between taxonomic gr...