Dataset for: Integrated trophic position as a proxy for food-web complexity

There are two distinct approaches to describing the distributions of biomass and species in food webs: one to consider them as discrete trophic levels (TLs); and the other to consider them as continuous trophic positions (TPs). Bridging the gap between these two perspectives presents a non-trivial challenge in integrating biodiversity and food-web structure.
Food Network Unfolding (FNU) is a technique used to bridge this gap by partitioning the biomass of species into integer TLs to compute three complexity indices, namely vertical (DV), horizontal (DH), and range (DR) diversity (D indices), through decomposition of Shannon’s index H’. Using FNU, the food web (a network of species with unique TPs) is converted to a linear food chain (a biomass distribution at discrete TLs). This enables us to expect that the unfolded biomass within species decreases exponentially as the TL increases. Under this condition, the mean TL value in unfolded food chains is hypothesized to have an exponential ...