Stability trophic cascades in food chains

Landscape variation influences trophic cascades in dengue vector food webs

The epidemiology of vector-borne diseases is governed by a structured array of correlative and causative factors, including landscape (for example, rural versus urban), abiotic (for example, weather), and biotic (for example, food web) factors. Studies of mosquito-borne diseases rarely address these multiple factors at large spatial scales, which limits insights into how human alterations of la...

Trophic Cascades in Lakes:

Trophic coherence determines food-web stability.

Why are large, complex ecosystems stable? Both theory and simulations of current models predict the onset of instability with growing size and complexity, so for decades it has been conjectured that ecosystems must have some unidentified structural property exempting them from this outcome. We show that trophic coherence--a hitherto ignored feature of food webs that current structural models fa...

Leading indicators of trophic cascades.

Regime shifts are large, long-lasting changes in ecosystems. They are often hard to predict but may have leading indicators which are detectable in advance. Potential leading indicators include wider swings in dynamics of key ecosystem variables, slower return rates after perturbation and shift of variance towards lower frequencies. We evaluated these indicators using a food web model calibrate...

Trophic cascades in a complex terrestrial community.

To test for direct and indirect effects of a top predator on three lower trophic levels, we conducted two multiyear predator addition experiments in a tropical wet forest. Periodic additions of a top predator (predatory clerid beetle) to a wet forest understory shrub caused a reduction in the predatory beetle's prey (a predatory ant), increased herbivory, and reduced leaf area of the plant. The...