Tetra-EU 1.0: a species-level trophic meta-web of European tetrapods

Motivation Documenting potential interactions between species represents a major step to understand and predict the spatial and temporal structure of multi-trophic communities and their functioning. The metaweb concept summarises the potential trophic (and non-trophic) interactions in a given species-pool. As such, it generalises the regional species-pool of community ecology by incorporating the potential relationships between species from different trophic levels along with their functional characteristics. However, while this concept is theoretically very attractive, it has rarely been used to understand the structure of ecological network, mostly because of data availability. Here, we provide a continental scale, species-level, metaweb for all tetrapods (mammals, breeding birds, reptiles, amphibians) occurring in Europe and in the Northern Mediterranean basin. This metaweb is based on data extracted from scientific literature, including published papers, books, and grey literature. ...