Evidence for the existence of a robust pattern of prey selection in food webs

Stouffer, Daniel B.; Camacho, J.; Jiang, Wenxin; Amaral, Luı́s A. Nunes

doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.0571

Cited by 165 publications

(301 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…A foodweb motif is a recognisable regular pattern of connections between nodes. Using food-web motifs to decompose larger, more complex food webs into more basic building blocks [25,26] shows that motifs are shared by food webs from distinct habitat types [26]. Motif analyses has also quantified the 'embeddedness' of individual species within their network in order to better link to traditional community ecology concepts such as keystone species [27].…”

Section: Intervalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Thompson

Brose

Dunne

et al. 2012

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

573

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: Intervalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Thompson

Brose

Dunne

et al. 2012

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

573

500

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…One must ask to what extent are these dynamic studies relevant for our understanding of entire food webs? A first step in answering this question could be to state that this depends on how relevant-or frequent-each of these trophic modules are in entire food webs Stouffer et al 2007). It is interesting to note that while research on complex networks has first quantified motifs and then explored the dynamical implications (Prill et al 2005), the reverse has occurred in ecology.…”

Section: Assembly Of Ecological Network (A) Dynamics Of Network Builmentioning

confidence: 99%

The assembly and disassembly of ecological networks

Bascompte

Stouffer

2009

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

177

142

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Global change has created a severe biodiversity crisis. Species are driven extinct at an increasing rate, and this has the potential to cause further coextinction cascades. The rate and shape of these coextinction cascades depend very much on the structure of the networks of interactions across species. Understanding network structure and how it relates to network disassembly, therefore, is a priority for system-level conservation biology. This process of network collapse may indeed be related to the process of network build-up, although very little is known about both processes and even less about their relationship. Here we review recent work that provides some preliminary answers to these questions. First, we focus on network assembly by emphasizing temporal processes at the species level, as well as the structural building blocks of complex ecological networks. Second, we focus on network disassembly as a consequence of species extinctions or habitat loss. We conclude by emphasizing some general rules of thumb that can help in building a comprehensive framework to understand the responses of ecological networks to global change.

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“…A lot of literature about networks is focused only on connected substructures (Milo et al 2002;Stouffer et al 2007). If one considers a network of only three nodes and one of them (i) is isolated, i.e., M ij D M ji D 0 8 j / D i, then this isolated node has no effect on the others and only the connected nodes are important.…”

Section: The Spectrum Of Ordered Three-node Substructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The generalised niche model (Stouffer et al 2006) relaxes the contiguity constraint of the feeding ranges by assigning predators a certain number of prey species with a lower index at random. We use here the convention that links point from predator to prey (Milo et al 2002;Newman 2003;Camacho et al 2007;Stouffer et al 2007), while part of the literature about food webs uses another convention, where the links point in the direction of the resource flow (Drossel & McKane 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prohibition rules for three-node substructures in ordered food webs with cannibalistic species

Guill

Paulau

2015

Israel J Ecol Evol

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We evaluate the spectrum of ordered three-node substructures in food webs taking self-links (cannibalism) into account. If the order of nodes in the network cannot be neglected, 512 substructures can be distinguished. Simple statistical models of networks impose constraints on the structure that prohibit a large number of substructures completely. We analyse two variants of the widely used niche model, the original niche model and the generalised niche model, and show analytically and numerically that they exclude 344 and 320 substructures, respectively. The prohibition rules for three-node substructures in the two niche-model variants are further contrasted with a large set of empirical food webs, which reveals that up to about 30% of the three-node substructures that occur in empirical food webs are prohibited by the model algorithms.

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Evidence for the existence of a robust pattern of prey selection in food webs

Cited by 165 publications

References 54 publications

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

The assembly and disassembly of ecological networks

Prohibition rules for three-node substructures in ordered food webs with cannibalistic species

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