trophiCH v1 - a food web for Switzerland

Environmental pressures on species can cascade within food webs and even extend beyond individual ecosystems to interconnected systems at large spatial scales. To facilitate the exploration of these dynamics, we constructed trophiCH: a data-based national trophic meta-food web (henceforth the metaweb), that includes vertebrates, invertebrates, and vascular plants within Switzerland's national boundaries, and drawing from literature published between 1862 and 2024. Our comprehensive dataset catalogues 1,112,073 trophic interactions involving 23,151 species and 125 feeding guilds (e.g., detritivores, fungivores, etc). Interactions were primarily documented at the species level from the literature. Additional species-level interactions were inferred by resolving coarser taxonomic records (e.g., using “species A feeds on genus B” to infer interactions between species A and species within genus B) using taxonomic and habitat co-occurrence information. We provide seven datasets: 1) the metaweb, 2) the taxa checklist, 3) the data source meta-dataset, 4) the list of generalist basal and predator families and polylectic species with citations and 5) a dataset with citations for the inferenc