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 inferences of missing predators, 6) a dataset with citations for the parallel inference of diets from similar species and 7) a list of other existing metawebs. The empirical dataset is 00_empirical_metaweb.csv. To reproduce the final metaweb (01_final_metaweb.csv), start the R Project file: trophich.Rproj. We provide five scripts, accompanying functions, and the raw data required to run these scripts to reproduce the taxonomic expansion and validation of the datasets. In the first script (01_inferring_interactions.R), we infer interactions using genus and family level interactions and for basal feeding groups (see Methods: Taxonomic expansion). In the second script (02_inferring_interactions_special_cases.R), we infer further interactions for a few special cases with detailed explanations. In the third script (03_metaweb_comparisons.Rmd), we provide the statistical comparisons between our metaweb and other empirical metawebs as an R Markdown document. We additionally provide a a Python Jupyter Notebook document, outlining the error validation of the data extraction process (04_error_validation.ipynb and an accompanying .html file). Finally, we provide a script to reproduce figure 1 from the associated data paper (05_metaweb_summary_figure_1.R).

This is a first step towards a comprehensive food web for Switzerland, but data gaps remain (see Reji Chacko et al 2024, Fig.1C). We encourage addition of new datasets to this metaweb and welcome any collaborations to contruibute to future versions of this dataset. Please contact: merin.rejichacko@gmail.com.