Food web ecology

The global biodiversity crisis concerns not only unprecedented loss of species within communities, but also the direct and indirect consequences for the functioning of the ecosystem:

• Community ecology focuses on patterns of species richness and community composition
• Ecosystem ecology focuses on fluxes of energy and materials

Food webs

Food webs provide a quantitative framework to combine these approaches and unify the study of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Foodweb ecology recently made a lot of progress due to the application of up-to-date techniques (e.g. trophic tracers or biomarkers).

Services

• Statistical data analysis (univariate and multivariate analyses of stomach content data, stable isotope data, fatty acid profiles,…)
• Courses on trophic markers, as part of the Ghent University doctoral school program or customer tailored

Applications

• Analysis of natural food webs based on field data
• Functional approach of impact studies, e.g. impact of pollution, changed environmental conditions
• Quantification of energy flow in rearing installations and other aquaculture settings, comparison of assimilation efficiency of diets with different feeds

Example

We can measure the flow of energy between for instance aquaculture installations and the natural surrounding environment or in an integrated multitrophic aquaculture (IMTA) installation. For instance, in one of our studies (Irissari et al., 2014) we analysed the outflow of fish cages to nearby mussel rafts. By means of fatty acids (FA) as trophic markers, we showed a lack of assimilation of fish feed FA biomarkers in the seston and mussel samples.