Species–size networks elucidate the effects of biodiversity on aboveground biomass in tropical forests

Food web structure mediate positive and negative effects of diversity on ecosystem functioning in a large floodplain river

“…This program has established several well-known relationships, including the decrease in food web connectance with species richness (May 1972; Thébault et al 2010), the increase in weak interactions with the ratio between predator-prey body size and prey diversity (Brose et al 2006; Loeuille 2010; Brose et al 2019, DeLong et al 2021), the prevalence of modularity and its role in stabilizing ecological networks (Stouffer & Bascompte 2011), the progressive coupling of energy channels by predators in higher trophic positions (Rooney & McCann 2008; Arim et al 2010), the network rewiring by adaptive foragers (Valdovinos 2010; Loeuille 2010; Bartley et al 2019) the spatial arrangement of food webs in metacommunities (Pillai et al 2012: Mougi and Kondoh 2016), and the decrease in resource use of generalist over specialist species (i.e. nestedness) with the increase of diversity (Trojelsgaard & Olesen et al 2013, Pinheiro et al 2019, Wen et al 2022). All these structural properties are expected to become more important as more species are interacting in the community (Fontaine 2013, Welti & Joern 2015), promoting well-defined changes in food web structure as diversity increases (Fig.…”