Ecological Food Webs: High-Quality Data Facilitate Theoretical Unification

Despite the enormous diversity and complexity of ecological systems, when data for many individuals of many different species are analyzed, there are emergent regularities in the statistical distributions of numerical abundance, spatial dispersion, trophic relations, and species richness, and in bivariate and multivariate relationships among these variables. These empirical macroecological patterns have been known for many decades, but now ecology is beginning to understand the mechanistic processes that produce them. This conceptual unification is being facilitated by two breakthroughs. First, intensive, technology-assisted empirical studies are generating vast quantities of new and better data. Second, theoretical advances are characterizing the interrelationships among ecological phenomena and explaining them in terms of first principles of physics, chemistry, and biology. There is much still to be done, but recent progress is encouraging.