title: Statistical analysis of food webs.
abstract: The numbers of species in different trophic levels of a food web are modeled as a trinomial random vector, with cell probabilities potentially depending on the total number of species in the web. A maximum likelihood method is developed to test the hypothesis that the fractions of species in different levels are independent of the total number of species. The method is applied to a data set whose properties have been debated in the literature, and it is shown to be a powerful alternative to the simple linear regression approach used in previous analyses.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics, Oregon State University, Corvallis 97331.
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Murtaugh
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004463:Ecology; D005523:Food Supply; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011235:Predatory Behavior; D011336:Probability; D012044:Regression Analysis