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      Consistent role of weak and strong interactions in high- and low-diversity trophic food webs

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      a , 1 , 2
      Nature Communications
      Nature Publishing Group

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          Abstract

          The growing realization of a looming biodiversity crisis has inspired considerable progress in the quest to link biodiversity, structure and ecosystem function. Here we construct a method that bridges low- and high-diversity approaches to food web theory by elucidating the connection between the stability of the basic building block of food webs and the mean stability properties of large random food web networks. Applying this theoretical framework to common food web models reveals two key findings. First, in almost all cases, high-diversity food web models yield a stability relationship between weak and strong interactions that are compatible in every way to simple low-diversity models. And second, the models that generate the recently discovered phenomena of being purely stabilized by increasing interaction strength correspond to the biologically implausible assumption of perfect interaction strength symmetry.

          Abstract

          High-and low-diversity food webs are thought to differ in their structural stability. Here, the authors use a method that bridges both levels of diversity to show that stability relationships and interaction strength can be consistent between simple and complex trophic networks.

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          Food-web structure and network theory: The role of connectance and size.

          Networks from a wide range of physical, biological, and social systems have been recently described as "small-world" and "scale-free." However, studies disagree whether ecological networks called food webs possess the characteristic path lengths, clustering coefficients, and degree distributions required for membership in these classes of networks. Our analysis suggests that the disagreements are based on selective use of relatively few food webs, as well as analytical decisions that obscure important variability in the data. We analyze a broad range of 16 high-quality food webs, with 25-172 nodes, from a variety of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Food webs generally have much higher complexity, measured as connectance (the fraction of all possible links that are realized in a network), and much smaller size than other networks studied, which have important implications for network topology. Our results resolve prior conflicts by demonstrating that although some food webs have small-world and scale-free structure, most do not if they exceed a relatively low level of connectance. Although food-web degree distributions do not display a universal functional form, observed distributions are systematically related to network connectance and size. Also, although food webs often lack small-world structure because of low clustering, we identify a continuum of real-world networks including food webs whose ratios of observed to random clustering coefficients increase as a power-law function of network size over 7 orders of magnitude. Although food webs are generally not small-world, scale-free networks, food-web topology is consistent with patterns found within those classes of networks.
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            All wet or dried up? Real differences between aquatic and terrestrial food webs.

            Ecologists have greatly advanced our understanding of the processes that regulate trophic structure and dynamics in ecosystems. However, the causes of systematic variation among ecosystems remain controversial and poorly elucidated. Contrasts between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in particular have inspired much speculation, but only recent empirical quantification. Here, we review evidence for systematic differences in energy flow and biomass partitioning between producers and herbivores, detritus and decomposers, and higher trophic levels. The magnitudes of different trophic pathways vary considerably, with less herbivory, more decomposers and more detrital accumulation on land. Aquatic-terrestrial differences are consistent across the global range of primary productivity, indicating that structural contrasts between the two systems are preserved despite large variation in energy input. We argue that variable selective forces drive differences in plant allocation patterns in aquatic and terrestrial environments that propagate upward to shape food webs. The small size and lack of structural tissues in phytoplankton mean that aquatic primary producers achieve faster growth rates and are more nutritious to heterotrophs than their terrestrial counterparts. Plankton food webs are also strongly size-structured, while size and trophic position are less strongly correlated in most terrestrial (and many benthic) habitats. The available data indicate that contrasts between aquatic and terrestrial food webs are driven primarily by the growth rate, size and nutritional quality of autotrophs. Differences in food-web architecture (food chain length, the prevalence of omnivory, specialization or anti-predator defences) may arise as a consequence of systematic variation in the character of the producer community.
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              Reconciling complexity with stability in naturally assembling food webs.

              Understanding how complex food webs assemble through time is fundamental both for ecological theory and for the development of sustainable strategies of ecosystem conservation and restoration. The build-up of complexity in communities is theoretically difficult, because in random-pattern models complexity leads to instability. There is growing evidence, however, that nonrandom patterns in the strengths of the interactions between predators and prey strongly enhance system stability. Here we show how such patterns explain stability in naturally assembling communities. We present two series of below-ground food webs along natural productivity gradients in vegetation successions. The complexity of the food webs increased along the gradients. The stability of the food webs was captured by measuring the weight of feedback loops of three interacting 'species' locked in omnivory. Low predator-prey biomass ratios in these omnivorous loops were shown to have a crucial role in preserving stability as productivity and complexity increased during succession. Our results show the build-up of food-web complexity in natural productivity gradients and pin down the feedback loops that govern the stability of whole webs. They show that it is the heaviest three-link feedback loop in a network of predator-prey effects that limits its stability. Because the weight of these feedback loops is kept relatively low by the biomass build-up in the successional process, complexity does not lead to instability.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Nat Commun
                Nat Commun
                Nature Communications
                Nature Publishing Group
                2041-1723
                12 April 2016
                2016
                : 7
                : 11180
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California Davis , 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA
                [2 ]Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph , Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1
                Author notes
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8170-1463
                Article
                ncomms11180
                10.1038/ncomms11180
                4832055
                27068000
                9ffee2e5-5c20-47fe-a317-a30964547ea9
                Copyright © 2016, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved.

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 07 June 2015
                : 26 February 2016
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