Résumé
Quantitative estimates of energy or material flows within food webs are increasingly viewed as essential to progress on a number of questions in ecosystem science. Inverse analysis has been used since the 1980s to estimate all flows within plankton food webs originally based on incomplete information. Its application to many aquatic environments, including the coastal zone, has led to a variety of methodological improvements. This chapter explains the methodology of inverse modeling and dynamic modeling that derived from this method and illustrates different application in ecosystems ecology. This approach also provides rigorous statistical comparisons of food web properties across ecosystems using indices from Ecological Network Analysis. Various methodological developments are currently underway and some of them are presented here, with a special focus on the link between static and dynamic modeling.