Global warming and ocean acidification are forecast to exert significant impacts on marine ecosystems worldwide. However, most of these projections are based on ecological proxies or experiments on single species or simplified food webs. How energy fluxes are likely to change in marine food webs in response to future climates remains unclear, hampering forecasts of ecosystem functioning. Using ...

Detailed morphological and dimensional analysis of the detritus deposited in the galleries of woodboring insects was performed for some of the most common xylophagous insect larvae in timber construction in Spain. The samples studied belong to six species of four common families of borers: Cerambycidae, Anobiidae, Curculionidae and Lyctidae. The samples were provided by Spanish and German compa...

The spiraling of resources in stream ecosystems is a well known phenomenon in the scientific literature. We implemented the necessary components of a nutrient cycle in a qualitative reasoning approach. The model includes entities that represent segments of a river and quantities for nutrients, autotrophs, and detritus, and employs three rates: uptake rate (from nutrients to autotrophs), retenti...

We investigated the roles of resource availability and phenotypic plasticity in promoting ecological character displacement (i.e., trait evolution stemming from resource competition between species). Because ecological character displacement generates new populations that differ in resource use, this process should only occur when exploitable resources are available. We tested this hypothesis i...

The O horizon, or detrital layer, of forest soils is linked to long-term forest productivity and health. Fuel reduction techniques, such as prescribed fire, can alter the thickness and composition of this essential ecosystem component. Developing an understanding of the changes in the chemical composition of forest detritus due to prescribed fire is essential for forest managers and stakeholder...

Wyatt F. Cross, Jonathan P. Benstead, Amy D. Rosemond and J. Bruce Wallace Institute of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA The Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA Department of Entomology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Stoichiometric relationships between consum...

The relative contributions of procaryotes and eucaryotes to the degradation of the lignin and polysaccharide components of lignocellulosic detritus in two marine and two freshwater wetland ecosystems were determined. Two independent methods-physical separation of bacteria from fungi and other eucaryotes by size fractionation, and antibiotic treatments-were used to estimate procaryotic and eucar...