Trophic species are a scientific grouping of organisms according to their shared trophic (feeding) positions in a

food web A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Another name for food web is consumer-resource system. Ecologists can broadly lump all life forms into one o ...

food chain A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web starting from producer organisms (such as grass or algae which produce their own food via photosynthesis) and ending at an apex predator species (like grizzly bears or killer whales), de ...

. Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of predators in the food web. This means that members of a trophic species share many of the same kinds of ecological functions. The idea of trophic species was first devised by Joel Cohen and Frederick Briand in 1984 to redefine assessment of the ratio of predators to prey within a food web. The category may include species of plant, animal, a combination of plant and animal, and biological stages of an organism. The reassessment grouped similar species according to habit rather than genetics. This resulted in a ratio of predator to prey in food webs is generally 1:1. By assigning groups in a trophic manner, relationships are linear in scale. This allows for predicting the proportion of different trophic links in a community food web.

References

Ecology Systems ecology {{ecology-stub