Trophic species

Trophic species are a scientific grouping of organisms according to their shared trophic (feeding) positions in a food web or food chain. 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.^[1][2] 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.^[3] 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.^[4] 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.^[5]