Unveiling the food webs of tetrapods across Europe through the prism of the Eltonian niche

Aim

Despite the recent calls on integrating the interaction networks into the study of large‐scale biodiversity patterns, we still lack a basic understanding of the functional characteristics of large interaction networks and how they are structured across environments. Here, building on recent advances in network science around the Eltonian niche concept, we aim to characterize the trophic groups in a large food web, and understand how these trophic groups vary across space.

Location

Europe and Anatolia.

Taxon

Tetrapods (1,136 species).

Methods

We combined an expert‐based metaweb of all European tetrapods with their spatial distributions and biological traits. To understand the functional structure of the metaweb, we first used a stochastic block model to group species with similar Eltonian niches, and then analysed these groups with species’ functional traits and network metrics. We then combined these groups with species distributions to understand how trophic di...