Trophic Similarity Between Species in a Food Web

A measure of the trophic similarity between species in a given trophic level (in general, any trophic partition) with respect to their prey is defined for the case in which quantitative indicators of the intensities of the flows are available. The measure is applied to a forb-arthropod food web; the resulting grouping of species by their similarities is biologically meaningful, and provides a good resolution of the structural position of species in the food web. It is concluded that the defined coefficient provides a satisfactory quantitative way for assessing the structural role of species in natural food webs.