A bioenergetic framework for aboveground terrestrial food webs

Abstract

Bioenergetic approaches have been greatly influential for understanding community functioning and stability and predicting effects of environmental changes on biodiversity. These approaches use allometric relationships to establish species' trophic interactions and consumption rates, and have been most successfully applied to aquatic ecosystems. Terrestrial ecosystems, where body mass is less predictive of plant-consumer interactions, present inherent challenges that these models have yet to meet. Here, we review the literature on the processes governing terrestrial plant-consumer interactions and develop a bioenergetic framework integrating those processes.Our framework integrates for the first-time bioenergetics specific to terrestrial plants and their consumers within a food-web approach that also considers mutualistic interactions, advancing understanding of terrestrial food webs and predictions of their responses to environmental changes.

Through the Random Forest: Ontogeny as a study system to connect prediction to explanation

“…The variety of ecological behavior across organismal ontogeny is an important frontier in ecological modeling 15 . The context-dependent complexities resulting from even our simple inclusions of ontogeny make clear the need to develop broadly applicable methodologies which improve generalizable ecological understanding.…”

“…One key source of ecological complexity is demographic heterogeneity, frequently modeled as stage-structured organismal ontogeny 15 . Explicitly modeled ontogenetic stages increase the number of unique ecological actors within a single species.…”

A highly resolved network reveals the role of terrestrial herbivory in structuring aboveground food webs

“…To determine criteria for including interactions in our food web, we applied a recentlyproposed framework for studying aboveground terrestrial food webs (ATFWs, Valdovinos et al 2023). This framework asserts that the complexity of plant tissues fundamentally distinguishes aboveground terrestrial ecosystems from their aquatic and belowground counterparts, shaping the structure and dynamics of ATFWs through distinctive patterns of growth and turnover.…”

“…Species also exhibit adaptive foraging and defensive behaviors, effectively "rewiring" trophic interactions in response to changing biotic and abiotic conditions (Bartley et al 2019, Ceron et al 2022, Valdovinos et al 2023). As such, limited surveys miss rare or cryptic species and interactions, even though such species and interactions likely provide critical contributions to ecosystem dynamics and function (Dee et al 2019, Simpson et al 2022.…”

“…Similarly, antagonistic interactions can be mutualistic, such as when herbivory stimulates greater plant production in a phenomenon called overcompensation (Ramula et al 2019). Therefore, there is growing consensus (Abrams 1987, McCall & Irwin 2006, Holland & DeAngelis 2009, Valdovinos et al 2023) that feeding interactions should be differentiated by their mediating traits (phenology, ontogeny, morphology), tissues (nectar, fruit, leaves), and bioenergetic or demographic consequences (yields and production costs), rather than their presumptive net effects.…”