Research
| Title： | Differential Responses of Food Web Properties to Opposite Assembly Rules and Species Richness |
|---|---|
| First author： | Guo, Yulun; Wang, Tao; Jorge, Garcia Molinos; Zhang, Huan; Zhang, Peiyu; Zhang, Min; Xu, Jun |
| Journal： | WATER |
| Years： | 2020 |
| DOI： | 10.3390/w12102828 |
| Abstract： | Trophic niches condition the energetic performance of species within food webs providing a vital link between food web assembly, species diversity, and functioning of ecosystems. Our understanding of this important link is, however, limited by the lack of empirical tools that can be easily applied to compare entire food webs at regional scales. By comparison, with different a priori synthetic models defined according to specific assembly rules (i.e., purely random, limiting similarity, and niche filtering), we demonstrate that a set of food web properties (trophic richness, evenness, and divergence) are controlled by ecological processes. We further demonstrate that although both limiting similarity and niche filtering are statistically significant assembly processes shaping our studied lake food webs, their relative importance is richness-dependent, and contextual to the specific food web property under consideration. Our results have both important theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, the observed richness-dependent variation on food web properties contradicts the common criticism on food web theory that food web properties are roughly scale-invariant. Practically, these properties can help avoiding spurious conclusions, while providing useful information for multiple food web niche spaces supporting the ecosystem functioning. |
