title: Estimating trophic link density from quantitative but incomplete diet data.
abstract: The trophic link density and the stability of food webs are thought to be related, but the nature of this relation is controversial. This article introduces a method for estimating the link density from diet tables which do not cover the complete food web and do not resolve all diet items to species level. A simple formula for the error of this estimate is derived. Link density is determined as a function of a threshold diet fraction below which diet items are ignored ("diet partitioning function"). Furthermore, analytic relationships between this threshold-dependent link density and the generality distribution of food webs are established. A preliminary application of the method to field data suggests that empirical results relating link density to diversity might need to be revisited.
authors.affiliation: Yokohama National University, Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama 240-8501, Japan. rossberg@ynu.ac.jp
authors.forename: A G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Rossberg
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Yanagi
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Amemiya
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Itoh
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D004032:Diet; D019277:Entropy; D020387:Food Chain; D008954:Models, Biological; D013045:Species Specificity