Foraging biology predicts food web complexity
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
Foraging biology predicts food web complexity.
Food webs, the networks of feeding links between species, are central to our understanding of ecosystem structure, stability, and function. One of the key aspects of food web structure is complexity, or connectance, the number of links expressed as a proportion of the total possible number of links. Connectance (complexity) is linked to the stability of webs and is a key parameter in recent mod...
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Understanding what structures ecological communities is vital to answering questions about extinctions, environmental change, trophic cascades, and ecosystem functioning. Optimal foraging theory was conceived to increase such understanding by providing a framework with which to predict species interactions and resulting community structure. Here, we use an optimal foraging model and allometries...
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Ecological theory suggests that complex food webs should not persist because of their inherent instability. "Real" ecosystems often support a large number of interacting species. A mathematical model shows that fluctuating short-term selection on trophic links, arising from a consumer's adaptive food choice, is a key to the long-term stability of complex communities. Without adaptive foragers, ...
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We discuss theoretical aspects of the broader food-web research agenda, particularly the background and various approaches used for modeling food-web dynamics in abstract systems with more than two taxa. Much of this type of modeling has oriented itself around the classic and enduring complexity-stability debate in ecology, especially those aspects which relate to the theoretical and associated...
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
سال: 2006
ISSN: 0027-8424,1091-6490
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0603039103