Sagar Adhurya , Nisha Agasti, Young-seuk Park

A metaweb is the regional pool of potential interactions, capturing the gamma diversity of species and interactions. A metaweb enables the generation of local webs from species occurrence data by subsampling contained interactions, thereby allowing insights into alpha and beta diversities with minimal data requirements. Moreover, understanding ecological interactions is critical for a complete ecological perspective and enhancing knowledge of ecosystem structure and function beyond species diversity alone. However, the Eltonian Shortfall—limited species interaction data—impedes this holistic view. Thus, predictive approaches utilising interaction matrices or additional node information (traits, phylogeny) have emerged to address this gap. This review explores the applications and methodologies in metaweb studies, detailing methods for metaweb construction, applying metawebs for generating local webs, and analysing both local webs and metawebs across alpha, beta, and gamma levels. This review further examines existing metaweb studies, uncovering insights into spatiotemporal network dynamics, the impact of environmental variation and human activity on network properties, climate change effects, and species interaction turnover. Applications are also discussed in community assembly processes, conservation planning, keystone species identification, trait-based analyses, and the usefulness of existing metawebs to reconstruct metawebs from other regions. We highlight future directions, emphasising expanding geographical coverage, enhancing interaction data collection, integrating conservation, and improving trait-based approaches through latent trait analysis. This review sets a benchmark for future research, advancing our understanding of ecological interactions while supporting Sustainable Development Goals 13 (climate action), 14 (life below water), and 15 (life on land).