FoodwebAI: Creating and augmenting food webs with natural language models

Food webs illustrate the complex interactions among organisms in ecosystems, crucial for understanding energy and material flows. However, building accurate food webs is challenging due to ecological complexity and data demands. FoodwebAI, a user-friendly web application, addresses this by using AI, specifically OpenAI’s GPT models via the ellmer R package, to enrich species lists with metadata and generate food webs from taxa lists alone. The application offers three functional modules: an AI-powered Food Web Creation module that generates trophic structure from a species list alone; an Ecopath module that allows users to visualize and augment food webs exported from Ecopath with Ecosim, including AI-generated icons for nodes; and a Manual module for exploratory food web construction. While still experimental, FoodwebAI demonstrates how AI can support ecological research by improving data accessibility and understanding of complex networks. The app is available at https://foodwebai.shinyapps.io/foodweb under a General Public License (GPLv3).