Publication‐driven consistency in food web structures: Implications for comparative ecology

Abstract

Large collections of freely available food webs are commonly reused by researchers to infer how biological or environmental factors influence the structure of ecological communities. Although reusing food webs expands sample sizes for community analysis, this practice also has significant drawbacks. As food webs are meticulously crafted by researchers for their own specific research endeavors and resulting publications (i.e., books and scientific articles), the structure of these webs inherently reflects the unique methodologies and protocols of their source publications. Consequently, combining food webs sourced from different publications without accounting for discrepancies that influence network structure may be problematic. Here, we investigate the determinants of structure in freely available food webs sourced from different publications, examining potential disparities that could hinder their effective comparison. Specifically, we quantify structural similarity across 274 commonly reused webs sourced from 105 publications using a subgraph technique. Surprisingly, we found no increased structural similarity between webs from the same ecosystem nor webs built using similar network construction methodologies. Yet, webs sourced from the same publication were very structurally similar with this degree of similarity increasing over time. As webs sourced from the same publication are typically sampled, constructed, and/or exposed to similar biological and environmental factors, publications likely holistically drive their own webs' structure to be similar. Our findings demonstrate the large effect that publications have on the structure of their own webs, which stymies inference when comparing the structure of webs sourced from different publications. We conclude by proposing different approaches that may be useful for reducing these publication‐related structural issues.