Biological parameters: food, cover, forage, browse and cover estimation
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Understanding what structures ecological communities is vital to answering questions about extinctions, environmental change, trophic cascades, and ecosystem functioning. Optimal foraging theory was conceived to increase such understanding by providing a framework with which to predict species interactions and resulting community structure. Here, we use an optimal foraging model and allometries of foraging variables to predict the structure of real food webs. The qualitative structure of the resulting model provides a more mechanistic basis for the phenomenological rules of previous models. Quantitative analyses show that the model predicts up to 65% of the links in real food webs. The deterministic nature of the model allows analysis of the model's successes and failures in predicting particular interactions.