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Ecology Food Web Designer with Species Interaction Simulator

Create detailed food webs and simulate species interactions for ecological studies and environmental education..

Design and Simulate Ecological Food Webs

Empower your ecology lessons with our interactive Food Web Designer and Species Interaction Simulator.

About This Tool

Revolutionize your ecology lessons with our food web designer.

Are you tired of static food web diagrams that fail to capture the dynamic nature of ecosystems? Look no further! Our Ecology Food Web Designer with Species Interaction Simulator is here to transform your teaching and learning experience.

Key Features:

Interactive Food Web Creation : Input your ecosystem type and species list to generate a comprehensive, visually appealing food web diagram.

Detailed Ecological Analysis : Receive expert explanations on trophic levels, energy flow, and species relationships within your custom ecosystem.

Dynamic Interaction Simulator : Explore the potential impacts of invasive species, predator removal, or environmental changes on your food web.

Real-world Applications : Gain insights into conservation strategies and ecosystem management based on simulated outcomes.

Flexible Learning Tool : Suitable for various educational levels, from middle school to university courses in ecology and environmental science.

Our tool combines cutting-edge ecological knowledge with user-friendly design, making it the perfect addition to your teaching arsenal. Whether you're introducing basic concepts or diving deep into complex ecosystem dynamics, the Food Web Designer adapts to your needs.

Benefits for Educators:

• Save time creating detailed, accurate food web diagrams
• Engage students with interactive, customizable simulations
• Demonstrate complex ecological concepts in an accessible manner
• Encourage critical thinking about ecosystem relationships and conservation

Benefits for Students:

• Visualize abstract ecological concepts
• Develop a deeper understanding of ecosystem dynamics
• Explore cause-and-effect relationships in food webs
• Gain hands-on experience with ecological modeling

Don't let your ecology lessons remain static. Bring your ecosystems to life with our Ecology Food Web Designer and Species Interaction Simulator today!

How It Works

Input Your Ecosystem : Provide details about your chosen ecosystem and the species present.

Generate Food Web : Our AI-powered tool creates a comprehensive food web diagram, complete with trophic levels and energy flow indicators.

Analyze Relationships : Receive a detailed explanation of species interactions, energy transfer, and key ecological roles within your food web.

Simulate Interactions : Choose a scenario (e.g., invasive species introduction) to see how it affects your ecosystem.

Explore Outcomes : Review potential short-term and long-term effects on population dynamics and overall ecosystem health.

Apply Insights : Use the generated information to discuss real-world conservation strategies and ecosystem management techniques.

Perfect for Various Educational Settings

• K-12 Classrooms : Introduce basic ecological concepts with visually engaging food webs.
• University Courses : Dive deep into complex ecosystem dynamics and modeling techniques.
• Environmental Education Programs : Demonstrate the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem balance to all ages.
• Research Projects : Generate hypotheses and explore potential outcomes for ecological studies.

Testimonials

"This tool has revolutionized how I teach ecology. My students are more engaged and grasp complex concepts much faster." - Dr. Emily Chen, Professor of Environmental Science

"The interaction simulator really brings ecosystems to life. It's helped me understand the delicate balance in nature." - Alex Thompson, High School Student

"As a conservation biologist, I find this tool invaluable for explaining ecosystem dynamics to both colleagues and the public." - Dr. Michael Okonkwo, Wildlife Conservation Society

Empower your ecological education with our Food Web Designer. Try it today and watch your ecosystem come to life!

Input Fields

Specieslist.

List of key species present in the ecosystem

EcosystemType

Type of ecosystem (e.g., tropical rainforest, coral reef, desert)

EducationalLevel

Target educational level (e.g., middle school, high school, university)

SimulationScenario

Specific interaction or event to simulate (e.g., invasive species introduction, predator removal)

Unlock the power of interactive ecology education. Design, simulate, and understand complex ecosystems with ease. Start creating your custom food webs now!

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Food Web: Concept and Applications

Introduction

There are two types of food chains: the grazing food chain, beginning with autotrophs, and the detrital food chain, beginning with dead organic matter (Smith & Smith 2009). In a grazing food chain, energy and nutrients move from plants to the herbivores consuming them, and to the carnivores or omnivores preying upon the herbivores. In a detrital food chain, dead organic matter of plants and animals is broken down by decomposers, e.g., bacteria and fungi, and moves to detritivores and then carnivores.

Food web offers an important tool for investigating the ecological interactions that define energy flows and predator-prey relationship (Cain et al. 2008). Figure 1 shows a simplified food web in a desert ecosystem. In this food web, grasshoppers feed on plants; scorpions prey on grasshoppers; kit foxes prey on scorpions. While the food web showed here is a simple one, most feed webs are complex and involve many species with both strong and weak interactions among them (Pimm et al. 1991). For example, the predators of a scorpion in a desert ecosystem might be a golden eagle, an owl, a roadrunner, or a fox.

The idea to apply the food chains to ecology and to analyze its consequences was first proposed by Charles Elton (Krebs 2009). In 1927, he recognized that the length of these food chains was mostly limited to 4 or 5 links and the food chains were not isolated, but hooked together into food webs (which he called "food cycles"). The feeding interactions represented by the food web may have profound effects on species richness of community, and ecosystem productivity and stability (Ricklefs 2008).

Types of Food Webs

Applications of food webs, food webs are constructed to describe species interactions (direct relationships)..

The fundamental purpose of food webs is to describe feeding relationship among species in a community. Food webs can be constructed to describe the species interactions. All species in the food webs can be distinguished into basal species (autotrophs, such as plants), intermediate species (herbivores and intermediate level carnivores, such as grasshopper and scorpion) or top predators (high level carnivores such as fox) (Figure 1).

These feeding groups are referred as trophic levels. Basal species occupy the lowest trophic level as primary producer. They convert inorganic chemical and use solar energy to generate chemical energy. The second trophic level consists of herbivores. These are first consumers. The remaining trophic levels include carnivores that consume animals at trophic levels below them. The second consumers (trophic level 3) in the desert food web include birds and scorpions, and tertiary consumers making up the fourth trophic level include bird predators and foxes. Grouping all species into different functional groups or tropic levels helps us simplify and understand the relationships among these species.

Food webs can be used to illustrate indirect interactions among species.

Indirect interaction occurs when two species do not interact with each other directly, but influenced by a third species. Species can influence one another in many different ways. One example is the keystone predation are demonstrated by Robert Paine in an experiment conducted in the rocky intertidal zone (Cain et al. 2008; Smith & Smith 2009; Molles 2010). This study showed that predation can influence the competition among species in a food web. The intertidal zone is home to a variety of mussels, barnacles, limpets, and chitons (Paine 1969). All these invertebrate herbivores are preyed upon by the predator starfish Pisaster (Figure 3). Starfish was relatively uncommon in the intertidal zone, and considered less important in the community. When Paine manually removed the starfish from experimental plots while leaving other areas undisturbed as control plots, he found that the number of prey species in the experimental plots dropped from 15 at the beginning of the experiment to 8 (a loss of 7 species) two years after the starfish removal while the total of prey species remained the same in the control plots. He reasoned that in the absence of the predator starfish, several of the mussel and barnacle species (that were superior competitors) excluded the other species and reduced overall diversity in the community (Smith & Smith 2009). Predation by starfish reduced the abundance of mussel and opened up space for other species to colonize and persist. This type of indirect interaction is called keystone predation.

Food webs can be used to study bottom-up or top-down control of community structure.

Top-down control occurs when the population density of a consumer can control that of its resource, for example, predator populations can control the abundance of prey species (Power 1992). Under top-down control, the abundance or biomass of lower trophic levels depends on effects from consumers at higher trophic levels. A trophic cascade is a type of top-down interaction that describes the indirect effects of predators. In a trophic cascade, predators induce effects that cascade down the food chain and affect biomass of organisms at least two links away (Ricklefs 2008). Nelson Hairston, Frederick Smith and Larry Slobodkin first introduced the concept of top-down control with the frequently quoted "the world is green" proposition (Power 1992; Smith & Smith 2009). They proposed that the world is green because carnivores depress herbivores and keep herbivore populations in check. Otherwise, herbivores would consume most of the vegetation. Indeed, a bird exclusion study demonstrated that there were significantly more insects and leaf damage in plots without birds compared to the control (Marquis & Whelan 1994).

Food webs can be used to reveal different patterns of energy transfer in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

As a diagram tool, food web has been approved to be effective in illustrating species interactions and testing research hypotheses. It will continue to be very helpful for us to understand the associations of species richness/diversity with food web complexity, ecosystem productivity, and stability.

References and Recommended Reading

Cain, M. L., Bowman, W. D. & Hacker, S. D. Ecology . Sunderland MA: Sinauer Associate Inc. 2008.

Cebrian, J. Patterns in the fate of production in plant communities. American Naturalist 154 , 449-468 (1999)

Cebrian, J. Role of first-order consumers in ecosystem carbon flow. Ecology Letters 7 , 232-240 (2004)

Elton, C. S. Animal Ecology . Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 1927, Republished 2001.

Knight, T. M., et al. Trophic cascades across ecosystems. Nature 437 , 880-883 (2005)

Krebs, C. J. Ecology 6 th ed. San Francisco CA: Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2009.

Marquis, R. J. & Whelan, C. Insectivorous birds increase growth of white oak through consumption of leaf-chewing insects. Ecology 75 , 2007-2017 (1994)

Molles, M. C. Jr. Ecology: Concepts and Applications 5 th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010.

Paine, R. T. The Pisaster-Tegula interaction: Prey parches, predator food preferences and intertide community structure. Ecology 60 , 950-961 (1969)

Paine, R. T. Food web complexity and species diversity. The American Naturalist 100 , 65-75 (1966)

Paine, R. T. Food webs: Linkage, interaction strength and community infrastructure. Journal of Animal Ecology 49 , 667-685 (1980)

Pimm, S. L., Lawton, J. H. & Cohen, J. E. Food web patterns and their consequences. Nature 350 , 669-674 (1991)

Power, M. E. Top-down and bottom-up forces in food webs: do plants have primacy? Ecology 73 , 733-746 (1992)

Schoender, T. W. Food webs from the small to the large. Ecology 70 , 1559-1589 (1989)

Shurin, J. B., Gruner, D. S. & Hillebrand, H. All wet dried up? Real differences between aquatic and terrestrial food webs. Proc. R. Soc. B 273 , 1-9 (2006) doi:10.1098/rspb.2005.3377

Smith, T. M. & Smith, R. L. Elements of Ecology 7 th ed. San Francisco CA: Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2009.

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Assignment: Food Webs

Created by Sandra T on 12/20/2021

10 activities: 10 games

Activity 1: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 20 min

Digiworld Adventure: Learn Food Webs

Go on an awesome adventure to the Digiworld and learn Food Webs together with Dr. Web! Play as Jessie / Jasson and learn more about organisms, ecosystems, and how food webs work.

Teacher Ratings (10) 3.7 stars.

Student Ratings (3560) 3.8 stars.

Activity 2: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 10 min

Food Webs: Adventure of the Energy (Elem)

A fairy named Elva is going to help you learn about ecosystems and the role each organism has in an ecosystem. You will start with the sun and explore the roles of producers, primary and secondary consumers, and decomposers. You will follow energy as it moves between each organism. You'll enjoy witnessing how energy continuously moves.

Teacher Ratings (51) 3.9 stars.

Student Ratings (15609) 3.8 stars.

Activity 3: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 13 min

Predator Vs Prey

Predator Vs Prey is an interactive game for students. They will have fun at each level and will navigate the food web by playing as various producers, consumers, and decomposers!

Teacher Ratings (215) 4.1 stars.

Student Ratings (39803) 4.0 stars.

Activity 4: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 11 min

Cycles of Matter

Take an interactive tour of the cycles of matter to learn how energy flows between organisms!

Teacher Ratings (103) 4.2 stars.

Student Ratings (29821) 3.7 stars.

Activity 5: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 9 min

Biosphere Architect

Students act as biosphere architects! Their goal is to develop a sustainable, balanced ecosystem in which producers, herbivores, carnivores, and decomposers interact and thrive.

Teacher Ratings (85) 4.1 stars.

Student Ratings (31960) 4.3 stars.

Activity 6: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 20 min

What eats What (Elem)

You will learn all about food chains and food webs, and each module will teach you a different component. After each module, you will have a chance to practice labeling the different parts of a food chain and food web. Correctly labeling the parts of a food chain and food web will yield more points. Don't worry....if you make a mistake, you can always try again!

Teacher Ratings (178) 4.3 stars.

Student Ratings (29646) 3.4 stars.

Activity 7: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 15 min

Food Web Builder

Great practice for building food webs! Players use pop-up clues about organisms to correctly place them into food chains or food webs from a variety of ecosystems around the world!

Teacher Ratings (608) 4.3 stars.

Student Ratings (62437) 3.6 stars.

Activity 8: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 14 min

Vee and PC-101 are aliens from planet Z, and they are wandering from planet to planet to learn about their habitats! Take a journey with Vee and PC-101 to learn about the food webs of Earth's organisms!

Teacher Ratings (98) 4.5 stars.

Student Ratings (65329) 3.9 stars.

Activity 9: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 18 min

Food Webs Around the World

Visit various biomes around the world. Collect all the plant and animal cards to learn about their roles in their ecosystem.

Teacher Ratings (79) 4.7 stars.

Student Ratings (39978) 3.6 stars.

Activity 10: Instructional Game. Estimated duration: 17 min

DNAtion is an adventure about creating a healthy ecosystem. To do that, you must adapt to the universal rule of life: everything is connected with each other. Populate the continent with animals, and make sure they have everything they need to survive!

Teacher Ratings (130) 4.0 stars.

Student Ratings (18032) 4.3 stars.

• My Storyboards

Creating Food Webs

In this activity, activity overview, template and class instructions, more storyboard that activities.

• This Activity is Part of Many Teacher Guides

Use this lesson plan with your class!

Animals rarely exist in single, one-dimensional food chains. In order to demonstrate a more realistic representation of how energy passes from living thing to another, students will create a food web from different food chains in a single habitat . In a similar way to food chains, the arrows represent the flow of energy from one animal to another. The different colors are there to emphasize the different trophic levels, but are not necessary.

As an alternative to this assignment, give students the example food web and get students to identify different food chains from it. As an extension, get students to start to thinking how the population of one type of living thing affects another. For example if the number of Mussels increase, how will this affect the population of whelk?

(These instructions are completely customizable. After clicking "Copy Activity", update the instructions on the Edit Tab of the assignment.)

Student Instructions

In the real world animals rarely exist in single food chains. Often animals need to eat different plants and animals to get all the nutrients they need. One way of showing more complex energy transfer relationships between living thing is using food webs. Create a food web from different food chains. Remember that all food webs start with energy from the Sun.

• Click "Start Assignment".
• Use these food chains to put together your food web. Use Photos for Class to find images and label them with their names. Make sure to use arrows to show the flow of energy from one living thing to another.
• Sun → Phytoplankton → Zooplankton → Caridean Shrimp → Cod
• Sun → Phytoplankton → Zooplankton → Caridean Shrimp → Laughing Gull
• Sun → Phytoplankton → Mussels → Laughing Gull
• Sun → Phytoplankton → Mussels → Jonah Crab → Laughing Gull
• Sun → Phytoplankton → Mussels → Whelk
• Sun → Phytoplankton → Mussels → American Lobster
• Sun → Seaweed → Limpet → Jonah Crab
• Sun → Seaweed → Limpet → Whelk → Laughing Gull

Lesson Plan Reference

Grade Level 6-8

Difficulty Level 4 (Difficult / Complex)

Type of Assignment Individual or Group

Type of Activity: Spider Maps

(You can also create your own on Quick Rubric .)

Food Chains

• Buccinum undatum (Common Whelk) • S. Rae • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• Cod • Cocayhi • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• fish1879 • NOAA Photo Library • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• fish3260 • NOAA Photo Library • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• Jonah crab • U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• Laughing Gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) • acryptozoo • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• limpet shell • S. Rae • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• Lobster • Jim, the Photographer • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• Mussel • Andy Gant • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• prawn • Dan Hershman • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)
• seaweed • cluczkow • License Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

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Food Web Designer: a flexible tool to visualize interaction networks

Daniela sint.

Mountain Agriculture Research Unit, Institute of Ecology, University of Innsbruck, Technikerstraße 25, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

Michael Traugott

Associated data.

Species are embedded in complex networks of ecological interactions and assessing these networks provides a powerful approach to understand what the consequences of these interactions are for ecosystem functioning and services. This is mandatory to develop and evaluate strategies for the management and control of pests. Graphical representations of networks can help recognize patterns that might be overlooked otherwise. However, there is a lack of software which allows visualizing these complex interaction networks. Food Web Designer is a stand-alone, highly flexible and user friendly software tool to quantitatively visualize trophic and other types of bipartite and tripartite interaction networks. It is offered free of charge for use on Microsoft Windows platforms. Food Web Designer is easy to use without the need to learn a specific syntax due to its graphical user interface. Up to three (trophic) levels can be connected using links cascading from or pointing towards the taxa within each level to illustrate top-down and bottom-up connections. Link width/strength and abundance of taxa can be quantified, allowing generating fully quantitative networks. Network datasets can be imported, saved for later adjustment and the interaction webs can be exported as pictures for graphical display in different file formats. We show how Food Web Designer can be used to draw predator–prey and host-parasitoid food webs, demonstrating that this software is a simple and straightforward tool to graphically display interaction networks for assessing pest control or any other type of interaction in both managed and natural ecosystems from an ecological network perspective.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10340-015-0686-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Key message

• Ecological network approaches provide a functional understanding of pest control but it is difficult to graphically display such complex interaction networks.
• Food Web Designer is a new software which allows to draw quantitative bi- and tripartite networks and it operates with Microsoft ® Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8.
• Food Web Designer is available free of charge and provides a straightforward tool to graphically display food webs and other types of interaction networks.

Introduction

Over the past two decades, ecological networks, including trophic and non-trophic interactions between species, have been extensively used to understand which mechanisms drive complex communities and how this affects the functioning of ecosystems (Ings et al. 2009 ). This approach has also been increasingly used to better understand how pests can be controlled in their environments (Derocles et al. 2014 ; Tylianakis and Binzer 2014 ; Welch and Harwood 2014 ). Pests are interacting with species within the same and other trophic levels such as natural enemies (Lundgren and Fergen 2014 ) and their antagonists (Gómez-Marco et al. 2015 ) or alternative prey (Kuusk and Ekbom 2010 ). The control of pests, either by biological or other means, happens within this interaction networks and it is the species’ interactions which govern, directly or indirectly, how efficient the pests’ population size and behaviour can be managed (Staudacher et al. 2013 ). Within ecological interaction networks especially food webs proved to be useful for assessing the efficacy of pest control with regard to factors such as crop and non-crop habitat connectivity (Derocles et al. 2014 ), landscape structure (Macfadyen et al. 2011 ), or environmental change (Tylianakis and Binzer 2014 ). A quantitative assessment of trophic and other ecological interactions thus provides an important functional approach for developing, modelling, and evaluating pest management measures (Tixier et al. 2013 ). However, due to the usually large number of interactions in communities which include pestiferous species, a merely abstract description and analysis of networks can be hard to comprehend (Bohan et al. 2013 ). According to the principle ‘ a picture is worth a thousand words’ , graphical representation of network data is therefore desired. Depending on the nature of the data to be depicted, several stand-alone tools and packages for R (R Development Core Team 2013 ) are available. For example, the software ‘Pajek’ (Mrvar and Batagelj 2015 ) is well suited to display and analyse large networks where many nodes are connected by binary link data. However, it is limited when the strength of interactions shall be taken into account as well. The R package ‘cheddar’ (Hudson et al. 2013 ) allows overcoming this limitation and can also be used to analyse network data, but it is not possible to display a network taking different (trophic) levels, taxon abundances and (trophic) link strength into account. In such cases the R package ‘bipartite’ (Dormann et al. 2008 ) is commonly used but it can handle only two trophic levels. Furthermore, all of these tools require command line input, which makes it harder to start using them. Driven by the need to illustrate feeding interaction data within the context of pest control (and beyond), we developed this stand-alone and easy to use program that allows generating custom-made bi- or tripartite interaction graphics with a few clicks. This program aims to fill the gap that currently exists for visualizing small- to medium-sized interaction networks in an easy and quick way: it allows displaying species abundances and species’ interactions between up to three (trophic) levels considering also the strength of these interactions.

Program features

Food web designer has an intuitive graphical interface which allows for easy inclusion of interaction network data without the need to learn a specific syntax or memorize input commands. All data can be entered directly in the corresponding windows for species and interactions data, respectively, and interaction networks can be created within a few minutes. All data and settings can be saved and re-opened as a food web project. Due to the ability to fully change all settings of an existing food web project, the graphical display of the network can be optimized easily.

Import functions for species and interactions data are implemented and allow creating also complex networks within a short period of time. Data for import are provided in semicolon delimited text files (.csv), a file format which can be easily generated and edited. All imported data are directly accessible in the program and adaptations or corrections of single values are possible at any time without the need to re-import the full dataset. The import function also allows quickly creating several interaction networks of the same layout by editing the data of abundances and interaction strength. Up to three trophic levels can be included in the network and the links connecting the taxa between the different trophic levels can be displayed as bars or triangles. The direction of the links (top-down or bottom-up) can be defined separately for each level. Colours for taxa and interaction links can be automatically assigned or selected from a standard windows dialogue providing 16 million colours. The optional scaling bars, representing the abundance of the taxa within each (trophic) level, can be adjusted to allow for a better comparison of taxa abundances between levels. For levels serving as food resources only, the standard bar view can be switched to a circle view if no abundances/quantitative measures need to be provided for each taxon. The networks can be exported as pictures in Windows Bitmap format (.bmp) or as Portable Network Graphics (.png) for subsequent use in presentations and publications. No analysis functions are implemented in Food Web Designer itself as it is developed as a visualisation tool. However, an export function provides all species and interaction data (including the assigned colours as RGB values) in a format that can be directly loaded into the R package ‘cheddar’.

A more detailed description of the functions and use of Food Web Designer 3.0 can be found in the program handbook (Suppl. 1).

Food Web Designer can be used freely with Microsoft ® operating systems and is available for download at no charge from http://www.uibk.ac.at/ecology/forschung/biodiversitaet.html.en . Redistribution of Food Web Designer 3.0 is granted as long as the original files are distributed unchanged and at no charge. The use of Food Web Designer has to be cited with reference to this article.

Example datasets

Dataset 1: pest-alternative prey-carabid trophic interaction network.

This example illustrates a trophic interaction network in aphid-infested barley fields and it is based on data presented in Staudacher et al. ( 2015 ). Carabid beetles were collected at two time points during aphid invasion and population establishment in barley fields in southern Sweden and classified as either small (<10 mm) or large (>10 mm). The carabids were then screened for the presence of prey DNA using diagnostic multiplex PCR targeting pest species (aphids, thrips), alternative extraguild (collembolans, earthworms, dipterans), and intraguild ( Pachygnatha spp., Lycosidae, Linyphiidae, other spiders, Pterostichus spp., Poecilus spp., Harpalus spp., Bembidion spp., Coccinella septempunctata , lacewings) prey. The relative diet composition (i.e. the percentage of carabids testing positive for specific prey types) of the two carabid size classes was used to create a food web for each time point (Fig.  1 ). The width of the horizontal bars in the centre of the food web depicts the number of small and large carabid beetles that were molecularly tested. To separate extraguild and intraguild prey groups, the taxa classified as extraguild prey (pests and alternative prey) were positioned at the bottom of the web, while the intraguild predatory taxa were placed above the carabid consumers. Consequently, the direction of the feeding links was selected to be bottom-up in the top panel and top-down in the bottom panel. As diagnostic PCR does not allow determining the number of prey individuals consumed but provides a prey detection frequency, triangles were selected as link type. The width of the triangle base represents the proportion to which the respective prey type contributed to the relative diet composition of the consumer. As no information on the abundances of the different prey types was available, the option to display the prey taxa as circles instead of bars was selected (Fig.  1 ).

Pest-alternative prey-carabid trophic interaction network generated from data presented in Staudacher et al. ( 2015 ), illustrating the relative diet composition of small and large carabid beetles ( middle bars ) during aphid invasion ( a ) and establishment ( b ) in two barely fields. Trophic links from carabids to extraguild ( lower panel ) and intraguild ( upper panel ) prey are represented as triangles; triangle base represents the proportion of carabids testing positive for specific prey taxa. The offset hatched bar represents 20 ( a ) and 10 ( b ) carabid beetles, respectively

Dataset 2: quantitative cereal aphid–primary–hyperparasitoid food webs

This example illustrates data presented in Traugott et al. ( 2008 ), where a hymenopteran endoparasitoid community attacking Sitobion avenae in a field of winter wheat was identified molecularly. The traditional approach of parasitoid rearing does not allow determining the links between primary and secondary parasitoids, as in hyperparasitized aphids only the secondary parasitoid emerges. By screening aphids and aphid mummies for the DNA of both primary and secondary parasitoids, it is possible to determine in about 70 % of cases which primary parasitoid species was used as host by the two hyperparasitoid species examined within this study. Here these trophic links between primary and secondary parasitoids (Table 4 in Traugott et al. 2008 ) are displayed as graphical network. As only one species of cereal aphids was investigated, only the parasitoid network is displayed in the food web. Abundances for primary and secondary parasitoids are available (Table 3 and Table 4 in Traugott et al. 2008 ) and a one to one relationship exists between primary and secondary parasitoids, i.e. each individual of a secondary parasitoid can be linked to one primary parasitoid and aphid individual, respectively. Thus, the interactions can be quantified and the two trophic levels in the food web share the same scaling. The trophic interactions/parasitisations are displayed as bars and the direction of the trophic links is top-down (Fig.  2 ).

Quantitative primary parasitoid–hyperparasitoid food web generated from data presented in Traugott et al. ( 2008 ), illustrating the parasitisation of primary parasitoids of Sitobion avenae by two hyperparasitoid species. The offset white bar represents 10 primary and secondary parasitoid individuals, respectively

Author contribution statement

DS and MT developed the idea and concept for the software, DS developed and implemented the software, DS and MT wrote the manuscript.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the project ‘Assessment and valuation of Pest suppression Potential through biological control in European Agricultural Landscapes—APPEAL’, part of the 2010 ERA-Net Biodiversa call for research proposals, with the national funders FORMAS (Sweden), BMBF (Germany), and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: project number I786). We are grateful to Karin Staudacher for valuable discussions on the manuscript and to Christian Newesely for testing the beta version of the software.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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