Applying a method before its proof of concept: A cautionary tale using inferred food webs

Abstract

There are significant pitfalls associated with developing food webs using inferred approaches, including violations of ecological assumptions, which considerably undermine their potentiality to resemble ecological communities and hence be practically useful. As data‐driven scientists, we must, at the very least, test against some empirical data to establish confidence that indeed the inferred food webs reflect their supposed in situ communities. Otherwise, using inferred networks to make bold claims—like the titular statement by Botella et al. (2024)  that food webs are influenced by land‐use intensity—is highly unlikely to be useful, especially when the aforementioned claim is unsubstantiated by the Authors' own statistical analyses.