Food Webs

ALTHOUGH it was first published twenty years ago, Stuart Pimm's Food Webs remains the clearest introduction to the study of the subject. Reviewing various hypotheses in the light of theoretical and empirical evidence, Pimm shows that even the most complex food webs follow certain patterns and that those patterns are shaped by a limited number of biological processes, such as population dynamics and energy flow. Pimm provides a variety of mathematical tools for unraveling these patterns and processes, and demonstrates their application through concrete examples. For this edition, Pimm has written a new foreword covering recent developments in the study of food webs and their continuing importance to conservation biology.