Trophic Interactions in the Subtidal Wadden Sea

Unravelling the intricate food web in the subtidal regions of the Wadden Sea is crucial for better understanding of the ecosystem. Even basic basic metrics of food web structure are useful indicators of ecosystem complexity compared to other often-used indices. Insight in the food web structure can also aid conservation efforts by pinpointing vulnerabilities and informing sustainable management strategies. However, the overview of the trophic interactions in the ecosystem to base such food webs on was incomplete. Therefore, we constructed a comprehensive interaction matrix that contains trophic interactions of all species we found during a two-year experiment with hard substrate in the Wadden Sea as well as during two subtidal sampling campaigns. The trophic interactions in the matrix are based on literature study. This dataset also contains an example R script that shows how a food web can be constructed and how metrics can be calculated based on this interaction matrix.