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The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A stochastic theory of community food webs I. Models and aggregated data

Cohen, Joel E., Newman, C. M.·1985·Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences

Abstract

Three recently discovered quantitative empirical generalizations describe major features of the structure of community food webs. These generalizations are: (i) a species scaling law: the mean proportions of basal, intermediate and top species remain invariant at approximately 0.19, 0.53, and 0.29, respectively, over the range of variation in the number of species in a web; (ii) a link scaling law : the mean proportions of trophic links in the categories basal-intermediate, basal-top, intermediate–intermediate, and intermediate–top remain invariant at approximately 0.27, 0.08, 0.30 and 0.35, respectively, over the range of variation in the number of species in a web; and (iii) a link-species scaling law: the ratio of mean trophic links to species remains invariant at approximately 1.86, over the range of variation in the number of species in a web. This paper presents a model, the only successful one among several attempts, in which the first two of these empirical generalizations can be derived as a consequence of the third. The model assumes that species are ordered in a cascade or hierarchy such that a given species can prey on only those species below it and can be preyed on by only those species above it in the hierarchy.

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Metadata

Authors
Cohen, J. E., & Newman, C. M.
Venue
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences
Published
1985-06-22
Volume
224
Issue
1237
Pages
421-448
ISSN
  • 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
  • 2053-9193
OpenAlex
W2067391982
Cited by
276
References
11
FWCI
5.04
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A stochastic theory of community food webs I. Models and aggregated data. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rspb.1985.0042
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Cohen, J. E., & Newman, C. M. (1985). A stochastic theory of community food webs I. Models and aggregated data. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1985.0042

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