| 1. |
- Brose, Ulrich, et al.
(författare)
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Body sizes of consumers and their resources
- 2005
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Ingår i: Ecology. - : Ecological Society of America. - 0012-9658 .- 1939-9170. ; 86:9, s. 2545-2545
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Trophic information—who eats whom—and species’ body sizes are two of the most basic descriptions necessary to understand community structure as well as ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Consumer–resource body size ratios between predators and their prey, and parasitoids and their hosts, have recently gained increasing attention due to their important implications for species’ interaction strengths and dynamical population stability. This data set documents body sizes of consumers and their resources. We gathered body size data for the food webs of Skipwith Pond, a parasitoid community of grass-feeding chalcid wasps in British grasslands; the pelagic community of the Benguela system, a source web based on broom in the United Kingdom; Broadstone Stream, UK; the Grand Caric¸aie marsh at Lake Neuchaˆtel, Switzerland; Tuesday Lake, USA; alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada of California; Mill Stream, UK; and the eastern Weddell Sea Shelf, Antarctica. Further consumer–resource body size data are included for planktonic predators, predatory nematodes, parasitoids, marine fish predators, freshwater invertebrates, Australian terrestrial consumers, and aphid parasitoids. Containing 16 807 records, this is the largest data set ever compiled for body sizes of consumers and their resources. In addition to body sizes, the data set includes information on consumer and resource taxonomy, the geographic location of the study, the habitat studied, the type of the feeding interaction (e.g., predacious, parasitic) and the metabolic categories of the species (e.g., invertebrate, ectotherm vertebrate). The present data set was gathered with the intent to stimulate research on effects of consumer–resource body size patterns on food-web structure, interaction-strength distributions, population dynamics, and community stability. The use of a common data set may facilitate cross-study comparisons and understanding of the relationships between different scientific approaches and models.
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| 2. |
- Yvon-Durocher, Gabriel, et al.
(författare)
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Across ecosystem comparisons of size structure: methods, approaches and prospects
- 2011
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Ingår i: OIKOS. - : Nordic Ecological Society. - 0030-1299. ; 120:4, s. 550-563
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding how ecological communities are structured and how this may vary between different types of ecosystems is a fundamental question in ecology. We develop a general framework for quantifying size-structure within and among different ecosystem types (e. g. terrestrial, freshwater or marine), via the use of a suite of bivariate relationships between organismal size and properties of individuals, populations, assemblages, pair-wise interactions, and network topology. Each of these relationships can be considered a dimension of size-structure, along which real communities lie on a continuous scale. For example, the strength, slope, or elevation of the body mass-versus-abundance or predator size-versus-prey size relationships may vary systematically among ecosystem types. We draw on examples from the literature and suggest new ways to use allometries for comparing among ecosystem types, which we illustrate by applying them to published data. Finally, we discuss how dimensions of size-structure are interconnected and how we could approach this complex hierarchy systematically. We conclude: (1) there are multiple dimensions of size-structure; (2) communities may be size-structured in some of these dimensions, but not necessarily in others; (3) across-system comparisons via rigorous quantitative statistical methods are possible, and (4) insufficient data are currently available to illuminate thoroughly the full extent and nature of differences in size-structure among ecosystem types.
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