For more than a century, trophic interactions have been central to the conceptual unification of population, community and ecosystems ecology. The partitioning of biomass among functional feeding levels within ecosystems – trophic structure – historically has been seen as fundamentally constrained by available productivity, energy, or nutrients from the ‘bottom-up’, or driven from the ‘top-down’ by predator forcing and subsequent indirect effects (i.e., trophic cascades). Vigorous debates over the relative importance of resource or predator control of food web structure and the strength and ubiquity of trophic cascades across ecosystem types have yielded to a more nuanced view. Collaboration among ecologists working in different systems and cross-system comparisons driven by data have led to a greater appreciation for the multitude of factors that can influence trophic structure and alter the likelihood of indirect effects across multiple trophic levels. Recent research has focused on heterogeneity of trophic structure, including factors such as the diversity and behavior of consumers from the large (top predators) to the small (pathogens and parasites), nutrient stoichiometric constraints on consumption and growth patterns, and the ubiquity and magnitude of detrital pathways and subsidy effects across ecosystem boundaries. Speakers bring a broad range of expertise across ecosystems, taxa, and organizational scales, and all will synthesize theory, observational and experimental datasets, and conservation objectives with their specific themes.