trophiCH v1 - a food web for Switzerland

To facilitate the exploration of these dynamics, we construct a data-based national trophic meta-food web (henceforth metaweb), that includes well-documented vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants within Switzerland's national boundaries, and compiles 160 years of ecological knowledge.

We additionally use a combination of taxonomic and geographic information to infer further species-level interactions. Our comprehensive dataset catalogues 1,112,073 trophic interactions involving 23,151 species and 125 feeding guilds (e.g. detritivores, fungivores, etc). While explorations of large-scale food webs in space and time have often relied on modelling approaches due to limited data availability, this empirically based metaweb paves the way for data-driven large-scale studies of real-world food webs.