Humans are one species in an ecological community. The functioning of the ecological community can strongly affect human well-being. One approach to understanding an ecological community uses food webs. Food webs describe who eats whom in an ecological community. Food webs are important to human health and well-being because chemical and biological toxins are often concentrated, and metabolized energy is lost, in each predator-prey link of the food webs. The aim of the study is to show that the diverse structures of reported food webs may be explained by a small number of general principles, and to use these general principles to understand the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. An understanding of food webs has practiced applications. In collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, the food web of rice fields will be constructed and analyzed. This study may yield novel suggestions for improved biological control of agricultural pests and provides an opportunity to test basic scientific generalizations about food web structure. A substantial effort will be devoted to answering new questions of mathematics, statistics, and computation raised by the study of ecology and populations. There is intellectual leverage in developing mathematical tools for studying biological problems, because experience shows that concepts, models, and analytical techniques developed in one biological setting are frequently helpful in others.
