Models for food-web collapse and loss of ecosystem services

How do food webs collapse?  Predictably, or at random, as the rivets pop out of the superstructure?   If they collapse predictably, will ecosystem services collapse in predictable ways?  Do food-webs collapse in the opposite way they assemble?  Is their any evidence for food-web hysteresis?  I think these are probably the key questions for Conservation Biology in the 21^st Century; yet they hardly appear on anyone’s radar screen.  In this talk I’ll provide a mixture of theoretical and empirical answers to some of these questions; I’ll partly draw on the information presented in the other talks in the symposium, but mainly to emphasize that the next generation of studies in conservation biology need to consider an understanding of trophic interactions and food-web structure as central to the development of long term management strategies for natural communities and habitats.