Energetic Food Webs

In ecosystems with many species, food webs form highly complex networks of resource-consumer interactions. At the same time, the food web as itself needs sufficient resources to develop and survive. So in fact, food web ecology is about how natural resources form the basis of biological communities, in terms of species richness and abundances as well as how species are organised in communities on the basis of the resource availability and use. The central theme of this book is that patterns in the utilisation of energy result from the trophic interactions among species, and that these patterns form the basis of ecosystem stability.

The authors integrate the latest work on community dynamics, ecosystem energetics, and stability, and in so doing attempt to dispel the categorisation of the field into the separate subdisciplines of population, community, and ecosystem ecology. Energetic Food Webs represents the first attempt to bridge the gap between the energetic and species approaches to ecology.

John Moore studied zoology and ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and received an MS in zoology at Michigan State University and an MS in Statistics at Colorado State University. His PhD focused on trophic interactions and food web analyses in natural and agricultural ecosystems. From 1991-2006 he was a faculty member at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) and as the director of the UNC Mathematics and Science Teaching Institute (2001-2006). In 2006 he was appointed as director of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University, and in 2010 as founding department head for the new Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability within the Warner College of Natural Resources. His research interests are in the fields of soil ecology, ecosystem ecology, mathematical/theoretical ecology, and the application of the theory of complex adaptive systems to teaching and learning.


Peter de Ruiter studied Biology and Mathematics at the Utrecht University. His PhD was a theoretical-empirical analysis of predator prey interactions in forest floor layers. Since then he has worked for 10 years at the DLO-Institute for Soil Fertility (Haren, NL), 10 years as chair-holder Environmental Sciences at the Utrecht University and, since 2006, as head of the Wageningen University Centre of Soil Science. In 2008 Peter de Ruiter was appointed as a 'personal professor' in the Wageningen University Biometris Institute that focuses on mathematical approaches in the life sciences. His main research interests are in the field of soil sciences, ecology, and mathematical/theoretical ecology. He is a member of various national and international scientific committees and research councils, including the Dutch Governmental Advisory Committee on Soil Protection.