Food webs: Ordering species according to body size yields high degree of intervality

Zook, Alexander; Eklöf, Anna; Jacob, Ute; Allesina, Stefano

doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.11.045

Cited by 38 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The BEF relationship within trophic levels is underpinned by niche partitioning, which is implicit in the niche model of food-web structure [81]. Food-web research has made considerable progress in developing metrics for intervality, which describe resource partitioning and directly relate species loss to occupation of niche space [82,83].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Thompson

Brose

Dunne

et al. 2012

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

589

500

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The global biodiversity crisis concerns not only unprecedented loss of species within communities, but also related consequences for ecosystem function. Community ecology focuses on patterns of species richness and community composition, whereas ecosystem ecology focuses on fluxes of energy and materials. Food webs provide a quantitative framework to combine these approaches and unify the study of biodiversity and ecosystem function. We summarise the progression of foodweb ecology and the challenges in using the food-web approach. We identify five areas of research where these advances can continue, and be applied to global challenges. Finally, we describe what data are needed in the next generation of food-web studies to reconcile the structure and function of biodiversity.Reconciling the study of biodiversity and ecosystem function We are experiencing two interrelated global ecological crises. One is in biodiversity, with unprecedented rates of species loss across all major ecosystems, combined with greatly accelerated biotic exchange between landmasses [1]. Consequently, spatial and temporal patterns of species occurrence are being fundamentally altered by extinction and invasion. The second crisis concerns the regulation of ecological processes and the ecosystem services they provide. Processes such as primary production and nutrient cycling have been severely altered by human activities [1].Our understanding of biodiversity comes largely from a sound theoretical and empirical basis provided by community ecology, including core concepts such as niche segregation [2] and Island Biogeography [3,4]. Early studies of individual species' habitat preferences and physiological tolerances have been complemented by studies of interspecific interactions from field surveys and experiments. Applications such as conservation management depend largely on mapping of community patterns and studies of habitat occupancy and preferences. More recently, habitat models have been applied, and the advent of simple and cheap molecular markers has allowed quantification of important community assembly (see Glossary) processes such as dispersal [5]. In community ecology the unit of study is the individual, population, or species, consistent with other sub-disciplines such as behavioural and population biology. Review GlossaryAssembly: the set of processes by which a food web is rebuilt after disturbance or the creation of new habitat. Bioenergetics: the flow and transformation of energy in and between living organisms and between living organisms and their environment. Cascade model: a food-web model which assumes hierarchical feeding along a single niche axis, with each species allocated a probability of feeding on taxa below it in the hierarchy. Community web: a food web intended to include all species and trophic links that occur within a defined ecological community. 'Species' in this sense might involve various degrees of aggregation or division of biological species. Compartmentalisation: the property by which one subset of sp...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Thompson

Brose

Dunne

et al. 2012

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

589

500

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In consequence, large and rare species usually occupy high trophic levels, consume many prey species and have few predators, whereas small and abundant species are found at low trophic levels with few links to prey but many links to predators (figure 3). Hence, many characteristics of how species are embedded in complex food webs are determined by their sizes [45,46,57,62], which stimulated the development of allometric network models [41]. These allometric studies include taxonomically defined species that are characterized by their population-averaged body masses thus ignoring variance in body masses within populations.…”

Section: Size Structure Of Natural Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change in size-structured ecosystems

Brose

Dunne

Montoya

et al. 2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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176

170

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One important aspect of climate change is the increase in average temperature, which will not only have direct physiological effects on all species but also indirectly modifies abundances, interaction strengths, food-web topologies, community stability and functioning. In this theme issue, we highlight a novel pathway through which warming indirectly affects ecological communities: by changing their size structure (i.e. the body-size distributions). Warming can shift these distributions towards dominance of small-over large-bodied species. The conceptual, theoretical and empirical research described in this issue, in sum, suggests that effects of temperature may be dominated by changes in size structure, with relatively weak direct effects. For example, temperature effects via size structure have implications for top-down and bottom-up control in ecosystems and may ultimately yield novel communities. Moreover, scaling up effects of temperature and body size from physiology to the levels of populations, communities and ecosystems may provide a crucially important mechanistic approach for forecasting future consequences of global warming.

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“…Based on this correspondence between an "abstract" niche variable and body size, other models for foodweb structure have been proposed (Loeuille and Loreau, 2005;Lewis and Law, 2007;Petchey et al, 2008). Recent works (Guimerà et al, 2010;Zook et al, 2011 ealt with the long-standing question of what determines the ecological niche of a species. These studies have tried to find an empirical property or a species trait playing the role of the niche dimension in models of food-web structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Degree of intervality of food webs: From body-size data to models

Capitán

Arenas

Guimerà

2013

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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Diet contiguity Ecological networks Food-web structure Niche dimension Species sizeIn food webs, the degree of intervality of consumers' diets is an indicator of the number of dimensions that are necessary to determine the niche of a species. Previous studies modeling food-web structure have shown that real networks are compatible with a high degree of diet contiguity. However, current models are also compatible with the opposite, namely that species' diets have relatively low contiguity. This is particularly true when one takes species' body size as a proxy for niche value, in which case the indeterminacy of diet contiguities provided by current models can be large. We propose a model that enables us to narrow down the range of possible values of diet contiguity. According to this model, we find that diet contiguity not only can be high, but must be high when species are ranked in ascending order of body size.

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Food webs: Ordering species according to body size yields high degree of intervality

Cited by 38 publications

References 30 publications

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Climate change in size-structured ecosystems

Degree of intervality of food webs: From body-size data to models

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