2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference

March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH

5/27/2021 | 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM | TRAIT-BASED FOOD WEBS REVEAL CONTINENTAL METACOMMUNITY PATTERNS | Virtual Platform

TRAIT-BASED FOOD WEBS REVEAL CONTINENTAL METACOMMUNITY PATTERNS

Food webs are powerful tools for biodiversity assessment, yet most food web studies span limited spatial and temporal scales. While modeling has produced a rich literature of food web theory, these ideas are seldom tested empirically. Here, we capitalize on a large, multi-trophic dataset from the U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to generate trait-based, heuristic food webs using a previously published pipeline. We constructed heuristic food webs for NEON streams, across several seasons and years, and extracted their network properties to explore how they vary through space and time and what environmental drivers influence this variation. We then tested several hypotheses predicted from food web theory, yet seldom tested empirically, especially across large spatial and temporal scales: 1) food webs with higher maximum trophic position are more stable temporally, 2) omnivory stabilizes food webs, 3) as food web complexity increases, food web stability increases, and 4) trophic coherence increases food web stability. Testing these hypotheses will yield important insights into how real food webs function over space and time and help to reconcile different ecological predictions that have arisen from food web modeling.

Meta-ecosystems
Models
Stream

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Presenters/Authors

Zacchaeus Compson (), University of North Texas, zacchaeus.greg.compson@gmail.com;