Plant diversity alters the representation of motifs in food webs.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Giling DP
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6420570 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Fatty acids are essential to macroinvertebrate growth and reproduction and can indicate food web structure and nutritional quality of basal resources. However, broad-scale examinations of how catchment land cover and associated stressors affect the proportions of fatty acids (FAs) in stream food webs are few.Here, we: (1) examine relationships among proportions of FAs among benthic periphyton and macroinvertebrate collector/gatherers, shredders, and predators; and (2) test if relationships between periphytic and macroinvertebrate FAs were altered due to the intensity of urban development in catchments.Proportions of the ?20-C eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA 20:5?3), arachidonic acid (ARA 20:4?6), and docosahexaenoic acid (22:6?3) indicated collector/gatherers had a diet richer in periphyton than in shredders, which had significantly lower proportions of these FAs. Collector/gatherers were in turn likely to be high-quality sources of ?3 and ? 20-C FAs for predators, which also had significantly greater EPA and ARA proportions than those in shredders. Linoleic (18:2?6) and ?-linolenic acid (18:3?3) comprised the greatest proportions of FAs in shredders, which suggested a diet dominated by leaf litter and associated hyphomycetes.As catchment urbanisation increased, proportions of total ?3 FAs and EPA in periphyton were significantly greater. This pattern also was seen through macroinvertebrate consumers and predators, given that proportions of these FAs in macroinvertebrates also were significantly correlated with factors associated with catchment urbanisation. The significant increase in total ?3 FAs and EPA proportions within shredders indicated that periphyton growth, and their FAs, increased on leaf litter, probably due to greater nutrient concentrations associated with catchment urbanisation. Proportions of total ?6 FAs in biota were not significantly correlated with factors associated with urban development, which could indicate that they were of sufficient abundance for consumers regardless of urban intensity or possible changes in their sources.Our study provides an informative first step that identified notable differences in proportions of FAs among macroinvertebrates in urban streams and an increase in proportions of total ?3 FAs and EPA in periphyton, consumers, and predators as catchment urbanisation increases. Identifying how FA relationships within food webs change in response to catchment alterations and stressors could inform land use and management decisions by linking environmental changes to measures important to ecosystem outcomes.
| S-EPMC6707523 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Species diversity is changing globally and locally, but the complexity of ecological communities hampers a general understanding of the consequences of animal species loss on ecosystem functioning. High animal diversity increases complementarity of herbivores but also increases feeding rates within the consumer guild. Depending on the balance of these counteracting mechanisms, species-rich animal communities may put plants under top-down control or may release them from grazing pressure. Using a dynamic food-web model with body-mass constraints, we simulate ecosystem functions of 20,000 communities of varying animal diversity. We show that diverse animal communities accumulate more biomass and are more exploitative on plants, despite their higher rates of intra-guild predation. However, they do not reduce plant biomass because the communities are composed of larger, and thus energetically more efficient, plant and animal species. This plasticity of community body-size structure reconciles the debate on the consequences of animal species loss for primary productivity.
| S-EPMC5059466 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Agricultural expansion is among the main threats to biodiversity and functions of tropical ecosystems. It has been shown that conversion of rainforest into plantations erodes biodiversity, but further consequences for food-web structure and energetics of belowground communities remains little explored. We used a unique combination of stable isotope analysis and food-web energetics to analyze in a comprehensive way consequences of the conversion of rainforest into oil palm and rubber plantations on the structure of and channeling of energy through soil animal food webs in Sumatra, Indonesia. Across the animal groups studied, most of the taxa had lower litter-calibrated Δ13C values in plantations than in rainforests, suggesting that they switched to freshly-fixed plant carbon ('fast' energy channeling) in plantations from the detrital C pathway ('slow' energy channeling) in rainforests. These shifts led to changes in isotopic divergence, dispersion, evenness, and uniqueness. However, earthworms as major detritivores stayed unchanged in their trophic niche and monopolized the detrital pathway in plantations, resulting in similar energetic metrics across land-use systems. Functional diversity metrics of soil food webs were associated with reduced amount of litter, tree density, and species richness in plantations, providing guidelines on how to improve the complexity of the structure of and channeling of energy through soil food webs. Our results highlight the strong restructuring of soil food webs with the conversion of rainforest into plantations threatening soil functioning and ecosystem stability in the long term.
| S-EPMC9033302 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Biodiversity increases the ability of ecosystems to provide multiple functions. Most studies report a positive relationship between species richness and the number of ecosystem functions. However, it is not known whether the number of functional groups is related to the structure of the underlying species interaction network. Here we present food web data from 115 salt marsh islands and show that network structure is associated with the number of functional groups present. Functional group diversity is heterogeneously distributed across spatial scales, with some islands hosting more functional groups than others. Functional groups form modules within the community so that food webs with more modular architectures have more functional group diversity. Further, in communities with different interaction types, modularity can be seen as the multifunctional equivalent of trophic complementarity. Collectively, these findings reveal spatial heterogeneity in the number of functional groups that emerges from patterns in the structure of the food web.
| S-EPMC4490355 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Many studies predict shifts in species distributions and community size composition in response to climate change, yet few have demonstrated how these changes will be distributed across marine food webs. We use Bayesian Additive Regression Trees to model how climate change will affect the habitat suitability of marine fish species across a range of body sizes and belonging to different feeding guilds, each with different habitat and feeding requirements in the northeast Atlantic shelf seas. Contrasting effects of climate change are predicted for feeding guilds, with spatially extensive decreases in the species richness of consumers lower in the food web (planktivores) but increases for those higher up (piscivores). Changing spatial patterns in predator-prey mass ratios and fish species size composition are also predicted for feeding guilds and across the fish assemblage. In combination, these changes could influence nutrient uptake and transformation, transfer efficiency and food web stability, and thus profoundly alter ecosystem structure and functioning.
| S-EPMC10946503 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Climate warming is predicted to alter the structure, stability, and functioning of food webs1-5. Yet, despite the importance of soil food webs for energy and nutrient turnover in terrestrial ecosystems, warming effects on these food webs-particularly in combination with other global change drivers-are largely unknown. Here, we present results from two complementary field experiments testing the interactive effects of warming with forest canopy disturbance and drought on energy fluxes in boreal-temperate ecotonal forest soil food webs. The first experiment applied a simultaneous above- and belowground warming treatment (ambient, +1.7°C, +3.4°C) to closed canopy and recently clear-cut forest, simulating common forest disturbance6. The second experiment crossed warming with a summer drought treatment (-40% rainfall) in the clear-cut habitats. We show that warming reduces energy fluxes to microbes, while forest canopy disturbance and drought facilitates warming-induced increases in energy flux to higher trophic levels and exacerbates reductions in energy flux to microbes, respectively. Contrary to expectations, we find no change in whole-network resilience to perturbations, but significant losses of ecosystem functioning. Warming thus interacts with forest disturbance and drought, shaping the energetic structure of soil food webs and threatening the provisioning of multiple ecosystem functions in boreal-temperate ecotonal forests.
| S-EPMC5714267 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Arthropod community composition in agricultural landscapes is dependent on habitat characteristics, such as plant composition, landscape homogeneity and the presence of key resources, which are usually absent in monocultures. Manipulating agroecosystems through the insertion of in-field floral resources is a useful technique to reduce the deleterious effects of habitat simplification. Food web analysis can clarify how the community reacts to the presence of floral resources which favour ecosystem services such as biological control of pest species. Here, we reported quantitative and qualitative alterations in arthropod food web complexity due to the presence of floral resources from the Mexican marigold (Tagetes erecta L.) in a field scale lettuce community network. The presence of marigold flowers in the field successfully increased richness, body size, and the numerical and biomass abundance of natural enemies in the lettuce arthropod community, which affected the number of links, vulnerability, generality, omnivory rate and food chain length in the community, which are key factors for the stability of relationships between species. Our results reinforce the notion that diversification through insertion of floral resources may assist in preventing pest outbreaks in agroecosystems. This community approach to arthropod interactions in agricultural landscapes can be used in the future to predict the effect of different management practices in the food web to contribute with a more sustainable management of arthropod pest species.
| S-EPMC5815608 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Patterns in food-web structure have frequently been examined in static food webs, but few studies have attempted to delineate patterns that materialize in food webs under nonequilibrium conditions. Here, using one of nature's classical nonequilibrium systems as the food-web database, we test the major assumptions of recent advances in food-web theory. We show that a complex web of interactions between insect herbivores and their natural enemies displays significant architectural flexibility over a large fluctuation in the natural abundance of the major herbivore, the spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana). Importantly, this flexibility operates precisely in the manner predicted by recent foraging-based food-web theories: higher-order mobile generalists respond rapidly in time and space by converging on areas of increasing prey abundance. This "birdfeeder effect" operates such that increasing budworm densities correspond to a cascade of increasing diversity and food-web complexity. Thus, by integrating foraging theory with food-web ecology and analyzing a long-term, natural data set coupled with manipulative field experiments, we are able to show that food-web structure varies in a predictable manner. Furthermore, both recent food-web theory and longstanding foraging theory suggest that this very same food-web flexibility ought to be a potent stabilizing mechanism. Interestingly, we find that this food-web flexibility tends to be greater in heterogeneous than in homogeneous forest plots. Because our results provide a plausible mechanism for boreal forest effects on populations of forest insect pests, they have implications for forest and pest management practices.
| S-EPMC2040472 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a diverse family of industrially significant synthetic chemicals infamous for extreme environmental persistence and global environmental distribution. Many PFAS are bioaccumulative and biologically active mainly due to their tendency to bind with various proteins. These protein interactions may be the most important element in determining the accumulation potential and tissue distribution of individual PFAS. Trophodynamics studies including aquatic food webs present inconsistent evidence for PFAS biomagnification. This study strives to identify whether the observed variability in PFAS bioaccumulation potential among species could correspond with interspecies protein composition differences. Specifically, this work compares the perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) serum protein binding potential and the tissue distribution of ten perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) detected in alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus), deepwater sculpin (Myoxocephalus thompsonii), and lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) of the Lake Ontario aquatic piscivorous food web. To identify interspecies differences in PFAS-binding serum proteins, fish sera were pre-equilibrated with PFOS, fractionated by serial molecular weight cut-off filter fractionation, followed by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry analysis of the tryptic protein digests and the PFOS extracts of each fraction. This workflow identified similar serum proteins for all fish species. However, serum albumin was only identified in lake trout, suggesting apolipoproteins are likely the primary PFAA transporters in alewife and deepwater sculpin sera. PFAA tissue distribution analysis provided supporting evidence for interspecies variations in lipid transport and storage, which may also contribute to the varied PFAA accumulation in these species.
2023-03-11 | PXD039145 | Pride
Project description:In the last decades, lowland tropical rainforest has been converted in large into plantation systems. Despite the evident changes above ground, the effect of rainforest conversion on the channeling of energy in soil food webs was not studied. Here, we investigated community-level neutral lipid fatty acid profiles in dominant soil fauna to track energy channels in rainforest, rubber, and oil palm plantations in Sumatra, Indonesia. Abundant macrofauna including Araneae, Chilopoda, and Diplopoda contained high amounts of plant and fungal biomarker fatty acids (FAs). Lumbricina had the lowest amount of plant, but the highest amount of animal-synthesized C20 polyunsaturated FAs as compared to other soil taxa. Mesofauna detritivores (Collembola and Oribatida) contained high amounts of algal biomarker FAs. The differences in FA profiles between taxa were evident if data were analyzed across land-use systems, suggesting that soil fauna of different size (macro- and mesofauna) are associated with different energy channels. Despite that, rainforest conversion changed the biomarker FA composition of soil fauna at the community level. Conversion of rainforest into oil palm plantations enhanced the plant energy channel in soil food webs and reduced the bacterial energy channel; conversion into rubber plantations reduced the AMF-based energy channel. The changes in energy distribution within soil food webs may have significant implications for the functioning of tropical ecosystems and their response to environmental changes. At present, these responses are hard to predict considering the poor knowledge on structure and functioning of tropical soil food webs.
| S-EPMC6706186 | biostudies-literature