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

Environmental pressures on species can cascade within food webs and even extend beyond individual ecosystems to interconnected systems at large spatial scales. To facilitate the exploration of these dynamics, we construct a data-based national trophic meta-food web (henceforth metaweb), that includes well-documented vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants within Switzerland's national boundaries, and compiles 160 years of ecological knowledge. We additionally use a combination of taxonomic and geographic information to infer further species-level interactions. Our comprehensive dataset catalogues 1,112,073 trophic interactions involving 23,151 species and 125 feeding guilds (e.g. detritivores, fungivores, etc). While explorations of large-scale food webs in space and time have often relied on modelling approaches due to limited data availability, this empirically based metaweb paves the way for data-driven large-scale studies of real-world food webs. By integrating the metaweb with knowledge of local species assemblages, future studies can gain insights into the impact of global change drivers, including climate change and land-use intensification, on food web structures across spatial scales.