Biotic interactions are widely recognised as the backbone of ecological communities, but how best to study them is a subject of intense debate, especially at macro‐ecological scales. While some researchers claim that biotic interactions need to be observed directly, others use proxies and statistical approaches to infer them. Despite this ambiguity, studying and predicting the influence of biotic interactions on biogeographic...

Land use intensification favours particular trophic groups which can induce architectural changes in food webs. These changes can impact ecosystem functions, services, stability and resilience. However, the imprint of land management intensity on food‐web architecture has rarely been characterized across large spatial extent and various land uses. We investigated the influence of land management intensity on six facets of food...

Aim Despite recent calls for integrating interaction networks into the study of large‐scale biodiversity patterns, we still lack a basic understanding of the functional characteristics of large interaction networks and how they are structured across environments. Here, building on recent advances in network science around the Eltonian niche concept, we aim to characterize the trophic groups in a large food web, and understand...

Describing how ecological interactions change over space and time and how they are shaped by environmental conditions is crucial to understand and predict ecosystem trajectories. However, it requires having an appropriate framework to measure network diversity locally, regionally and between samples (α‐, γ‐ and β‐diversity). Here, we propose a unifying framework that builds on Hill numbers and accounts both for the probabilist...

Investigating how trophic interactions influence the β‐diversity of meta‐communities is of paramount importance to understanding the processes shaping biodiversity distribution. Here, we apply a statistical method for inferring the strength of spatial dependencies between pairs of species groups. Using simulated community data generated from a multi‐trophic model, we showed that this method can approximate biotic interactions...