| 1. |
- Binzer, Amrei, et al.
(författare)
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The susceptibility of species to extinctions in model communities
- 2011
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Ingår i: Basic and Applied Ecology. - : Elsevier. - 1439-1791 .- 1618-0089. ; 12:7, s. 590-599
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite the fact that the loss of a species from a community has the potential to cause a dramatic decline in biodiversity, for example through cascades of secondary extinctions, little is known about the factors contributing to the extinction risk of any particular species. Here we expand earlier modeling approaches using a dynamic food-web model that accounts for bottom-up as well as top-down effects. We investigate what factors influence a species’ extinction risk and time to extinction of the non-persistent species. We identified three basic properties that affect a species’ risk of extinction. The highest extinction risk is born by species with (1) low energy input (e.g. high trophic level), (2) susceptibility to the loss of energy pathways (e.g. specialists with few prey species) and (3) dynamic instability (e.g. low Hill exponent and reliance on homogeneous energy channels when feeding on similarly sized prey). Interestingly, and different from field studies, we found that the trophic level and not the body mass of a species influences its extinction risk. On the other hand, body mass is the single most important factor determining the time to extinction of a species, resulting in small species dying first. This suggests that in the field the trophic level might have more influence on the extinction risk than presently recognized.
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| 2. |
- Curtsdotter, Alva, et al.
(författare)
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Robustness to secondary extinctions: Comparing trait-based sequential deletions in static and dynamic food webs
- 2011
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Ingår i: Basic and Applied Ecology. - : Elsevier. - 1439-1791 .- 1618-0089. ; 12:7, s. 571-580
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The loss of species from ecological communities can unleash a cascade of secondary extinctions, the risk and extent of which are likely to depend on the traits of the species that are lost from the community. To identify species traits that have the greatest impact on food web robustness to species loss we here subject allometrically scaled, dynamical food web models to several deletion sequences based on species’ connectivity, generality, vulnerability or body mass. Further, to evaluate the relative importance of dynamical to topological effects we compare robustness between dynamical and purely topological models. This comparison reveals that the topological approach overestimates robustness in general and for certain sequences in particular. Top-down directed sequences have no or very low impact on robustness in topological analyses, while the dynamical analysis reveals that they may be as important as high-impact bottom-up directed sequences. Moreover, there are no deletion sequences that result, on average, in no or very few secondary extinctions in the dynamical approach. Instead, the least detrimental sequence in the dynamical approach yields an average robustness similar to the most detrimental (non-basal) deletion sequence in the topological approach. Hence, a topological analysis may lead to erroneous conclusions concerning both the relative and the absolute importance of different species traits for robustness. The dynamical sequential deletion analysis shows that food webs are least robust to the loss of species that have many trophic links or that occupy low trophic levels. In contrast to previous studies we can infer, albeit indirectly, that secondary extinctions were triggered by both bottom-up and top-down cascades.
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| 3. |
- Curtsdotter, Alva, et al.
(författare)
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The interaction between species traits and community properties determine food web resistance to species loss
- 2014
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The ability to identify the ecosystems most vulnerable to species loss is fundamental for the allocation of conservation efforts. With this aim, the traits of keystone species have been investigated, as have the properties defining systems especially sensitive to species loss. However, these two have rarely been investigated in relation to each other. Here we show, that the traits of the species primarily lost act in conjunction with the properties of the food web from which it is lost, in determining the resistance of the system. We find that the extent of bottom-up extinction cascades is determined mainly by traits related to food web topology, while traits related to population dynamics govern the extent of top-down cascades. As different disturbances affect species with different traits, this interaction implies that the characteristics defining a sensitive community depend on the disturbance it is subjected to.
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| 4. |
- Digel, Christoph, et al.
(författare)
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Unravelling the complex structure of forest soil food webs: higher omnivory and more trophic levels
- 2014
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Ingår i: Oikos. - : Wiley / Nordic Ecological Society. - 0030-1299 .- 1600-0706. ; 123:10, s. 1157-1172
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Food web topologies depict the community structure as distributions of feeding interactions across populations. Although the soil ecosystem provides important functions for aboveground ecosystems, data on complex soil food webs is notoriously scarce, most likely due to the difficulty of sampling and characterizing the system. To fill this gap we assembled the complex food webs of 48 forest soil communities. The food webs comprise 89 to 168 taxa and 729 to 3344 feeding interactions. The feeding links were established by combining several molecular methods (stable isotope, fatty acid and molecular gut content analyses) with feeding trials and literature data. First, we addressed whether soil food webs (n = 48) differ significantly from those of other ecosystem types (aquatic and terrestrial aboveground, n = 77) by comparing 22 food web parameters. We found that our soil food webs are characterized by many omnivorous and cannibalistic species, more trophic chains and intraguild-predation motifs than other food webs and high average and maximum trophic levels. Despite this, we also found that soil food webs have a similar connectance as other ecosystems, but interestingly a higher link density and clustering coefficient. These differences in network structure to other ecosystem types may be a result of ecosystem specific constraints on hunting and feeding characteristics of the species that emerge as network parameters at the food-web level. In a second analysis of land-use effects, we found significant but only small differences of soil food web structure between different beech and coniferous forest types, which may be explained by generally strong selection effects of the soil that are independent of human land use. Overall, our study has unravelled some systematic structures of soil food-webs, which extends our mechanistic understanding how environmental characteristics of the soil ecosystem determine patterns at the community level.
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| 5. |
- Jacob, Ute, et al.
(författare)
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The Role of Body Size in Complex Food Webs : A Cold Case
- 2011
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Ingår i: Advances in Ecological Research. - : Elsevier. - 0065-2504 .- 2163-582X. ; 45, s. 181-223
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Human-induced habitat destruction, overexploitation, introduction of alien species and climate change are causing species to go extinct at unprecedented rates, from local to global scales. There are growing concerns that these kinds of disturbances alter important functions of ecosystems. Our current understanding is that key parameters of a community (e.g. its functional diversity, species composition, and presence/absence of vulnerable species) reflect an ecological network’s ability to resist or rebound from change in response to pressures and disturbances, such as species loss. If the food web structure is relatively simple, we can analyse the roles of different species interactions in determining how environmental impacts translate into species loss. However, when ecosystems harbour species-rich communities, as is the case in most natural systems, then the complex network of ecological interactions makes it a far more challenging task to perceive how species’ functional roles influence the consequences of species loss. One approach to deal with such complexity is to focus on the functional traits of species in order to identify their respective roles: for instance, large species seem to be more susceptible to extinction than smaller species. Here, we introduce and analyse the marine food web from the high Antarctic Weddell Sea Shelf to illustrate the role of species traits in relation to network robustness of this complex food web. Our approach was threefold: firstly, we applied a new classification system to all species, grouping them by traits other than body size; secondly, we tested the relationship between body size and food web parameters within and across these groups and finally, we calculated food web robustness. We addressed questions regarding (i) patterns of species functional/trophic roles, (ii) relationships between species functional roles and body size and (iii) the role of species body size in terms of network robustness. Our results show that when analyzing relationships between trophic structure, body size and network structure, the diversity of predatory species types needs to be considered in future studies.
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| 6. |
- Rall, Bjoern C., et al.
(författare)
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Universal temperature and body-mass scaling of feeding rates
- 2012
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Ingår i: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. - : The Royal Society. - 1471-2970 .- 0962-8436. ; 367:1605, s. 2923-2934
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Knowledge of feeding rates is the basis to understand interaction strength and subsequently the stability of ecosystems and biodiversity. Feeding rates, as all biological rates, depend on consumer and resource body masses and environmental temperature. Despite five decades of research on functional responses as quantitative models of feeding rates, a unifying framework of how they scale with body masses and temperature is still lacking. This is perplexing, considering that the strength of functional responses (i.e. interaction strengths) is crucially important for the stability of simple consumer-resource systems and the persistence, sustainability and biodiversity of complex communities. Here, we present the largest currently available database on functional response parameters and their scaling with body mass and temperature. Moreover, these data are integrated across ecosystems and metabolic types of species. Surprisingly, we found general temperature dependencies that differed from the Arrhenius terms predicted by metabolic models. Additionally, the body-mass-scaling relationships were more complex than expected and differed across ecosystems and metabolic types. At local scales (taxonomically narrow groups of consumer-resource pairs), we found hump-shaped deviations from the temperature and body-mass-scaling relationships. Despite the complexity of our results, these body-mass-and temperature-scaling models remain useful as a mechanistic basis for predicting the consequences of warming for interaction strengths, population dynamics and network stability across communities differing in their size structure.
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| 7. |
- Riede, Jens O, et al.
(författare)
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Size-based food web characteristics govern the response to species extinctions
- 2011
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Ingår i: Basic and Applied Ecology. - : Elsevier. - 1439-1791 .- 1618-0089. ; 12:7, s. 581-589
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How ecological communities react to species extinctions is a long-standing yet current question in ecology. The species constituting the basic units of ecosystems interact with each other forming complex networks of trophic relationships and the characteristics of these networks are highly important for the consequences of species extinction. Here we take a more general approach and analyze a broad range of network characteristics and their role in determining food web susceptibility to secondary extinctions. We extend previous studies, that have focused on the consequences of topological and dynamical foodweb parameters for food web robustness, by also defining network-wide characteristics depending on the relationships between the distribution of species body masses and other species characteristics. We use a bioenergetic dynamical model to simulate realistically structured model food webs that differ in their structural and dynamical properties as well as their size structure. In order to measure food web robustness we calculated the proportion of species going secondarily extinct. A multiple regression analysis was then used to fit a general model relating the proportion of species going secondarily extinct to the measured foodweb properties. Our results show that there are multiple factors from all three groups of food web characteristics that affect foodweb robustness. However, we find the most striking effect was related to the body mass–abundance relationship which points to the importance of body mass relationships for food web stability.
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| 8. |
- Riede, James O., et al.
(författare)
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Stepping in Elton's footprints: a general scaling model for body masses and trophic levels across ecosystems
- 2011
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Ingår i: Ecology Letters. - : Wiley-Blackwell. - 1461-023X .- 1461-0248. ; 14:2, s. 169-178
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Despite growing awareness of the significance of body-size and predator–prey body-mass ratios for the stability of ecological networks,our understanding of their distribution within ecosystems is incomplete. Here, we study the relationships between predator and prey size,body-mass ratios and predator trophic levels using body-mass estimates of 1313 predators (invertebrates, ectotherm and endothermvertebrates) from 35 food-webs (marine, stream, lake and terrestrial). Across all ecosystem and predator types, except for streams (whichappear to have a different size structure in their predator–prey interactions), we find that (1) geometric mean prey mass increases withpredator mass with a power-law exponent greater than unity and (2) predator size increases with trophic level. Consistent with ourtheoretical derivations, we show that the quantitative nature of these relationships implies systematic decreases in predator–prey bodymassratios with the trophic level of the predator. Thus, predators are, on an average, more similar in size to their prey at the top of foodwebsthan that closer to the base. These findings contradict the traditional Eltonian paradigm and have implications for our understandingof body-mass constraints on food-web topology, community dynamics and stability.
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| 9. |
- Vucic-Pestic, Oliver, et al.
(författare)
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Habitat structure and prey aggregation determine the functional response in a soil predator-prey interaction
- 2010
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Ingår i: Pedobiologia. - : Elsevier BV. - 1873-1511 .- 0031-4056. ; 53:5, s. 307-312
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Functionalresponses describe the per capita consumption rates of predators depending on prey density, which quantifies the energy transfer between trophic levels. We studied a typical interaction of the litter–soil systems between hunting spiders (Pardosa lugubris; Araneae: Lycosidae) and springtails (Heteromurus nitidus; Collembola: Entomobryidae) at varying habitatstructure, i.e. with moss vs. without moss. We found a hyperbolic increase in consumption (functionalresponse type II) in the treatment without habitatstructure that was converted into a roller-coaster (or dome-shaped in a broad sense) functionalresponse in treatments with habitatstructure. Additional experiments suggest that the reduced per capita consumption rates at high prey densities may be explained by aggregative defence behaviour of the springtails. Experimentally, this behaviour was induced by the presence of habitatstructure. We analyzed the net-energy gain of this predator–preyinteraction by comparing the predator’s metabolic energy loss to its energy gain by consumption. In treatments with habitatstructure, the net-energy gain of the predator was limited at intermediate prey densities where preyaggregation reduced the consumption rates. Our results stress the importance of habitatstructure and prey behaviour in shaping the functionalresponse in a typical soil–litter predator–preyinteraction.
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