A species-level multi-trophic metaweb for Switzerland

Merin Reji Chacko, Camille Albouy, Florian Altermatt, Joan Casanelles Abella, Martin Brändle, Victor Boussange, Fadri Campell, Willem N. Ellis, Fabian Fopp, Martin Gossner, Hsi-Cheng Ho, Alain Joss, Pascal Kipf, Felix Neff , Andjeljko Petrović, Vincent Prié, Željko Tomanović, Nik Zimmerli, Loïc Pellissier

Understanding how species interact within ecological networks is essential for predicting the consequences of environmental change, from trophic cascades to broader changes in species distributions and ecosystem functioning across large spatial scales. To facilitate the such explorations, we constructed trophiCH: a national trophic meta-food web (henceforth “metaweb”) that includes vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants within Switzerland, based on literature published between 1862 and 2023. Our comprehensive dataset catalogues 1,112,073 trophic interactions involving 23,151 species and 125 feeding guilds (e.g., fungivores). Thirty percent of species-level interactions were empirically documented. Additional species-level interactions were inferred by resolving coarser taxonomic records (e.g., inferring links from “species A feeds on genus B”) based on habitat co-occurrences. While explorations of large-scale food webs have often relied on modelling approaches due to data gaps, this empirically based metaweb paves the way for data-driven studies of real-world food webs across space and time. By integrating the metaweb with local species assemblages knowledge, future studies can gain insights into broad patterns of food web structure across spatial scales.