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- Berg, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Ecological communities are vulnerable to realistic extinction sequences
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Loss of species will directly change the structure of ecological communities, which in turn may cause additional species loss (secondary extinctions) due to indirect effects (e.g. loss of resources or altered population dynamics). The vulnerability of food webs to repeated species loss is expected to be affected by food web topology, species interactions and the order in which species go extinct. Species traits such as body size, abundance and connectivity probably determine the vulnerability to extinction of species and, thus, the order in which species go primarily extinct. However, how different sequences of primary extinctions affect the vulnerability of food webs to secondary extinctions, when species abundances are allowed to respond dynamically, is not well understood. So far, only one study has incorporated species dynamics when assessing the effect of different extinction sequences on community structure, and only a limited number of extinction sequences have been evaluated. Here, using complex model food webs and including population dynamics, we analyze the effect of 33 extinction sequences on community structure using R50 (the proportion of primarily removed species needed to cause a 50% reduction in species richness) as a measure of community robustness to secondary extinctions. As expected, we find community structure to be highly vulnerable to removal of primary producers. More surprisingly, removing species based on traits that are strongly linked to the trophic position of species (such as large-bodied species, rare species, species with a high net effect, species with a high trophic position) are found to be as destructive as removing only primary producers. Such top-down oriented removal of species are often considered to correspond to realistic primary extinctions of species, but earlier studies, based on topological approaches, have not found such realistic extinction sequences to have any drastic effect on the remaining community. Thus, our result suggests that ecological communities could be more vulnerable to realistic extinction sequences than previously believed.
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| 2. |
- Berg, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Rare but important: perturbations to uncommon species have disproportionately large impact on ecological communities
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The majority of species in the ecosystems of the world are rare. Because the contributions to community biomass and productivity of many of these species are small it has been suggested that loss of rare species should have relatively small ecological consequences. However, the extent to which rare species affect the structure and stability of ecosystems is largely unknown. Using a theoretical approach, based on analytical methods, we here investigate how perturbations to rare as well as common species affect the structure (distribution of equilibrium abundances of species) and resilience (recovery rate) of complex ecological communities. We show that, contrary to expectation, resilience and structure of ecological communities are generally more sensitive to perturbations to rare than to common species. We find the explanation for this to lie in the cause of rarity: rare species tend to interact strongly, on a per capita basis, with other species. Our results suggest that many rare species are likely to fill important ecological roles in ecosystems.
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| 3. |
- Berg, Sofia, et al.
(author)
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Using species traits to predict secondary extinctions during food web disassembly
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Global change keeps pushing species towards extinction which results in altered structures of ecological communities. Consequently, the loss of certain species can trigger a cascade of secondary extinctions resulting in further degradation of the system. The importance of species for upholding the structure of communities may be linked to the traits of species. However, due to the altered structure of communities following species loss, the importance of species (and species traits) may change as the structure of the food web change. Using a dynamical approach and simulating species loss in complex model communities we analyze the potential importance of 11 species traits. We find that the most important trait varies for different degree of food web collapse and food web connectance. Though, as the most important traits of species usually are correlated we conclude that the importance of species traits is rather robust against structural changes in the communities (especially when only consumer species are targets of primarily extinctions). Interestingly, food webs display a collapse threshold (after the initial loss of approximately 25% of all species) from which secondary extinctions increases. Finally, consider only the loss of consumer species, the effect (number of secondary extinctions) on community structure caused by a large perturbation (species loss) is positively correlated to the response of food webs resulting from a small perturbation to the same species.
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