Analysis of vertebrate predator-prey community

Book excerpt: This monograph is about predation in vertebrate animal community. The studies were done in the seminatural terrains with transitional mixed forest within the European forest zone in Belarus. The result part was organised as a top-down flow: First, the community characteristics related to predators were estimated. I presented data on predator species richness, population density and biomass with special attention paid to the changes in predator species diversity occurred during the last two centuries and particularly in connection with the American mink and raccoon dog naturalization. Then, the main features of predator food niches were given, and the structure of various predator guilds and size structure in predators were analysed. The next part of the monograph was devoted to examining of community-important factors acting in semi-natural terrains. Such factors affected either the whole community or its marked fragment. The last quite a large part of the monograph consisted of many chapters which present more or less essential results on different predator species, and stresses hot questions of their population ecology.