Aquatic ecology and Biodiversity

Unit 4- Community ecology

4.1.3 Community analysis
A procedure for investigating the structure, function and regulation of aquatic communities and understanding of ecosystem functioning. It comprises methodologies based on biomass size, distributions, followed by food web analysis, network analysis and dynamic simulation models. Biomass size distributions provide a structural and energetic food web analysis based on measurements of abundances and body sizes, and with a few general assumptions mainly on size relationships of metabolic activities and trophodynamics. Food web analysis considers binary webs depicting qualitatively trophic links between species or trophic guilds and provides profound information about the food web structure. Mass-balanced flow diagrams (trophic webs) take into account the magnitude of flows between living and non-living compartments and provide comprehensive descriptions of fluxes and cycling of matter and the trophic food web structure when evaluated by network analysis.