Input/Output Analysis: Input/output analysis quantifies direct and indirect trophic effects for each component in the network. From this analysis, one can determine the full dependency of one compartment relative to all other compartments. For example, input/output analysis would quantify the degree to which a fish species relies on pelagic as opposed to benthic resources.

Trophic Status: The complexity of the structure of food webs can be simplified by mapping their trophic exchanges into a simple linear chain of composite trophic levels (Lindeman 1942) by weighting and averaging the trophic position at which each compartment feeds. The advantage of such a transformation is that food chain length and overall trophic efficiencies are easily discernible.

Cycling: A cycle is defined as a pathway in which material and energy travels through the food web to arrive at where it began (also known as an "arc"). Cycling of material and energy is an important property of ecosystems, particularly as it relates to autonomous system behavior, i.e., reduced dependency on outside energy inputs. Ecosystem properties important in cycling include the number of cycles, whether cycles occur over short and fast pathways vs. long and slow pathways, and the percentage of material and energy that is recycled. Other measures include: 1) information about each arc, such as the amount of material and energy recycled through that arc and other pathways using that same arc (a "nexus"), and, 2) separation of cyclic and noncyclic pathways.

Ecosystem Indices: Ulanowicz (1986) has developed a suite of ecosystem level indices based on information theory. These indices characterize the state of a food web. They include total system throughput, ascendency, developmental capacity, overhead, and redundancy. Total system throughput is simply the sum of all the flows that occur in that food web; it characterizes the overall activity of the ecosystem. Ascendency is a measure of the size and organization of flows and can be interpreted as the tightness of the constraints that channel trophic linkages. Higher values for ascendency represent a food web with more trophic specialists, increased cycling, and higher efficiency, while lower values for ascendency represent a more generalist-based food web, decreased cycling, and lower transfer efficiencies. The limit, or upper bound, to ascendency is the developmental capacity. Developmental capacity is proportional to the variety of flows in a network, and is a surrogate for the complexity of an ecosystem. Developmental capacity minus ascendency equals overhead. Overhead represents the amount of developmental capacity that does not appear as organized structure or constraints. That is, overhead represents all the ambiguities of connection and incoherencies of flow (i.e., disordered activity) that are available to be reorganized as an ecosystem develops. Redundancy is that component of the overhead that reflects parallelisms in the internal pathways of trophic transfers so that any two compartments cannot be severed by elimination of a single intervening link.