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451 results for “food webs”
Ubanization Re-Shapes a Food Web
<ol> <li>Cities represent humanity's most intense impact on our Planet, with more than half of all humans now residing in urban areas. Indeed, urbanization has well understood impacts on both individual species and general patterns of biodiversity. However, species do not exist in isolation, but are instead members of complex interaction networks that shape patterns of diversity and influence ecosystem services.</li> <li>Despite the importance of species interaction for creating patterns of diversity, we do not understand how urbanization alters these interactions. Here, we investigate how an interaction network (food web) is reshaped by urbanization.</li> <li>We show that, consistent with theory, cities tend to support less diverse ecological communities, and rare species that interact with few species are particularly sensitive to urbanization. As a result, remnant urban food webs tend to have more interactions per species and greater connectance, creating more integrated interaction networks.</li> <li>We discuss the implications of this food web reshaping for ecological stability, eco-evolutionary dynamics, and the joining of interaction networks and conservation planning. The role of cities in reshaping interaction networks provides an interesting study of food web (dis)assembly, while also shedding light on new approaches to applied conservation issues.</li> </ol>
Data from: Complex indirect effects of epiphytic bromeliads on the invertebrate food webs of their support tree
Ecosystem engineers are species that affect others through the provision of habitat rather than consumptive resources. The extent to which ecosystem engineers can indirectly affect entire food webs, however, is poorly understood. Epiphytic tank bromeliads (Bromeliaceae) are ecosystem engineers that are common throughout the Neotropics, and are associated with a variety of predatory arthropods. Here, we examine if bromeliads, by increasing predator densities, indirectly benefit their support tree through reduction in herbivorous insects and leaf damage. We observed and manipulated bromeliad densities in Costa Rican orange orchards, and measured impacts on leaf damage and arboreal and bromeliad invertebrate communities in two different seasons. Our results show that bromeliads are associated with predatory and herbivorous invertebrates but not leaf damage. Bromeliads were correlated with increased densities of their associated predators, especially ants and hunting spiders, but we could not confirm a causal link. Associations with bromeliads changed over time, with seasonal shifts interfering with responses to our manipulations. Bromeliads had a reduced association with predators in the dry season. Moreover, a null association between bromeliads and herbivorous invertebrates in the dry season unexpectedly became positive in the wet season. In summary, we have only limited evidence that bromeliads indirectly promote the top-down control of arboreal herbivores; instead, our manipulations suggest that bromeliads increase herbivore densities in the wet season. This research suggests that although bromeliads may act as ecosystem engineers, indirectly influencing the invertebrate food web on support trees, their effects are trophically complex and seasonally dependent.
Data from: The adaptive capacity of lake food webs: from individuals to ecosystems
Aquatic ecosystems support size structured food webs, wherein predator-prey body sizes span orders of magnitude. As such, these food webs are replete with extremely generalized feeding strategies, especially among the larger bodied, higher trophic position taxa. The movement scale of aquatic organisms also generally increases with body size and trophic position. Together, these body size, mobility, and foraging relationships suggest that organisms lower in the food web generate relatively distinct energetic pathways by feeding over smaller spatial areas. Concurrently, the potential capacity for generalist foraging and spatial coupling of these pathways often increases, on average, moving up the food web toward higher trophic levels. We argue that these attributes make for a food web architecture that is inherently 'adaptive' in its response to environmental conditions. This is because variation in lower trophic level dynamics is dampened by the capacity of predators to flexibly alter their foraging behavior. We argue that empirical, theoretical, and applied research needs to embrace this inherently adaptive architecture if we are to understand the relationship between structure and function in the face of ongoing environmental change. Toward this goal, we discuss empirical patterns in the structure of lake food webs to suggest that ecosystems change consistently, from individual traits to the structure of whole food webs, under changing environmental conditions. We then explore an empirical example to reveal that explicitly unfolding the mechanisms that drive these adaptive responses offers insight into how human-driven impacts, such as climate change, invasive species, and fisheries harvest, ought to influence ecosystem structure and function (e.g., stability, secondary productivity, maintenance of major energy pathways). We end by arguing that such a directed food web research program promises a powerful across-scale framework for more effective ecosystem monitoring and management.
Data from: Effects of spatial scale of sampling on food web structure
This study asks whether the spatial scale of sampling alters structural properties of food webs and whether any differences are attributable to changes in species richness and connectance with scale. Understanding how different aspects of sampling effort affect ecological network structure is important for both fundamental ecological knowledge and the application of network analysis in conservation and management. Using a highly resolved food web for the marine intertidal ecosystem of the Sanak Archipelago in the Eastern Aleutian Islands, Alaska, we assess how commonly studied properties of network structure differ for 281 versions of the food web sampled at five levels of spatial scale representing six orders of magnitude in area spread across the archipelago. Species (S) and link (L) richness both increased by approximately one order of magnitude across the five spatial scales. Links per species (L/S) more than doubled, while connectance (C) decreased by approximately two-thirds. Fourteen commonly studied properties of network structure varied systematically with spatial scale of sampling, some increasing and others decreasing. While ecological network properties varied systematically with sampling extent, analyses using the niche model and a power-law scaling relationship indicate that for many properties, this apparent sensitivity is attributable to the increasing S and decreasing C of webs with increasing spatial scale. As long as effects of S and C are accounted for, areal sampling bias does not have a special impact on our understanding of many aspects of network structure. However, attention does need be paid to some properties such as the fraction of species in loops, which increases more than expected with greater spatial scales of sampling.
Data from: Choice of resolution by functional trait or taxonomy affects allometric scaling in soil food webs
Belowground organisms often display a shift in their mass-abundance scaling relationships due to environmental factors such as soil chemistry and atmospheric deposition. Here we present new empirical data that show strong differences in allometric scaling according to whether the resolution at the local scale is based on a taxonomic or a functional classification, while only slight differences arise according to soil environmental conditions. For the first time, isometry (an inverse 1∶1 proportion) is recognized in mass-abundance relationships, providing a functional signal for constant biomass distribution in soil biota regardless of discrete trophic levels. Our findings are in contrast to those from aquatic ecosystems, in that higher trophic levels in soil biota are not a direct function of increasing body mass.
Data from: Climate change alters the structure of arctic marine food webs due to poleward shifts of boreal generalists
Climate-driven poleward shifts, leading to changes in species composition and relative abundances, have been recently documented in the Arctic. Among the fastest moving species are boreal generalist fish which are expected to affect arctic marine food web structure and ecosystem functioning substantially. Here, we address structural changes at the food web level induced by poleward shifts via topological network analysis of highly resolved boreal and arctic food webs of the Barents Sea. We detected considerable differences in structural properties and link configuration between the boreal and the arctic food webs, the latter being more modular and less connected. We found that a main characteristic of the boreal fish moving poleward into the arctic region of the Barents Sea is high generalism, a property that increases connectance and reduces modularity in the arctic marine food web. Our results reveal that habitats form natural boundaries for food web modules, and that generalists play an important functional role in coupling pelagic and benthic modules. We posit that these habitat couplers have the potential to promote the transfer of energy and matter between habitats, but also the spread of pertubations, thereby changing arctic marine food web structure considerably with implications for ecosystem dynamics and functioning.
Data from: Recognizing cross-ecosystem responses to changing temperatures: soil warming impacts pelagic food webs
The energy and materials that move across ecosystem boundaries influence food web structure and key ecosystem functions. Despite the acknowledged importance of such ecological subsidies, surprisingly little information is available regarding the role of environmental temperature in influencing subsidy quality and the response of the recipient ecosystem. We evaluated the impacts of temperature-mediated changes in leaves from deciduous trees, an important subsidy from terrestrial to freshwater ecosystems, on both the producer-based and detritivore-based components of a pelagic pond food web in a field mesocosm experiment. We hypothesized that variation in leaf chemistry driven by increased soil temperature would alter both the quality of leaf subsidies and the pond response. We collected red maple Acer rubrum leaves from heated and ambient temperature plots from the long-term soil warming experiment at the Harvard Experimental Forest and added them to 167-l field mesocosms containing established plankton communities, creating 'no leaf', 'ambient leaf' and 'heated leaf' treatments during autumn 2012. We then monitored physical, chemical, and biological responses to treatments until the mesocosms froze six weeks later. Experimental soil warming altered the chemical composition of deciduous leaves, the physical and chemical environment of the aquatic ecosystems to which leaves were added, and the pelagic pond food webs as measured by community composition. Compared to leaves from ambient-temperature soils, leaves from warmed soils initially resulted in lower water column phosphorus and dissolved organic carbon, reducing bacterial densities. However, the diminished carbon and phosphorus resulting from soil warming also increased light availability that ultimately stimulated cladoceran zooplankton relative to ambient-temperature leaves. Our results suggest that changes in temperature can alter ecological subsidies in unanticipated ways, and suggest that accurately predicting the potential consequences of climate change will require conducting research across ecosystem boundaries.
Data from: Linking size spectrum, energy flux and trophic multifunctionality in soil food webs of tropical land-use systems
1. Many ecosystem functions depend on the structure of food webs, which heavily relies on the body size spectrum of the community. Despite that, little is known on how the size spectrum of soil animals responds to agricultural practices in tropical land-use systems and how these responses affect ecosystem functioning. 2. We studied land-use induced changes in belowground communities in tropical lowland ecosystems in Sumatra (Jambi province, Indonesia), a hotspot of tropical rainforest conversion to rubber and oil palm plantations. The study included ca. 30,000 measured individuals from 33 high-order taxa of meso- and macrofauna spanning eight orders of magnitude in body mass. Using individual body masses we calculated the metabolism of trophic guilds and used food-web models to calculate energy fluxes and infer ecosystem functions, such as decomposition, herbivory, primary and intraguild predation. 3. Land-use change was associated with reduced abundance and taxonomic diversity of soil invertebrates, but strong increase in total biomass and moderate changes in total energy flux. These changes were due to increased biomass of large-sized decomposers in soil, in particular earthworms, with their share in community metabolism increasing from 11% in rainforest to 59-76% in jungle rubber, and rubber and oil palm plantations. Decomposition, i.e. the energy flux to decomposers, stayed unchanged, but herbivory, primary and intraguild predation decreased by an order of magnitude in plantation systems. Intraguild predation was very important, being responsible for 38% of the energy flux in rainforest according to our model. 4. Conversion of rainforest into monoculture plantations is associated by an uneven loss of size classes and trophic levels of soil invertebrates resulting in sequestration of energy in large-sized primary consumers and restricted flux of energy to higher trophic levels. Pronounced differences between rainforest and jungle rubber reflect sensitivity of rainforest soil animal communities to moderate land-use changes. Soil communities in plantation systems sustained high total energy flux despite reduced biodiversity. The high energy flux into large decomposers but low energy fluxes to other trophic guilds suggests that trophic multifunctionality of belowground communities is compromised in plantation systems.
Data from: Reconstructing hyperdiverse food webs: gut content metabarcoding as a tool to disentangle trophic interactions on coral reefs
1. Anthropogenic stressors have strong impacts on ecosystems. To understand their influence, detailed knowledge about trophic relationships among species is critical. However, this requires both exceptional resolution in dietary assessments and sampling breadth within communities, especially for highly-diverse, tropical ecosystems. 2. We used gut content metabarcoding across a broad range of coral reef fishes (8 families, 22 species) in Mo'orea, French Polynesia to test whether this technique has the potential to capture the structure of a hyperdiverse marine food web. Moreover, we explored whether taxonomic groups (families) and traditional, broad-scale trophic assignments explained fish diet across four different metrics of quantifying predator-prey interactions. 3. Metabarcoding yielded a large number (4,341) of unique operational taxonomic units (i.e. prey) with high-resolution taxonomic assignments (i.e. often to the level of genus or species). We demonstrate that across multiple metrics, taxonomic group at the family level is a consistently better, albeit still weak, predictor of empirical trophic relationships than frequently-used, broad-scale functional assignments. Our method also reveals a complex trophic network with fine-scale partitioning among species, further emphasizing the importance of examining fish diets beyond broad trophic categories. 4. We demonstrate the capacity of metabarcoding to reconstruct diverse and complex food webs with exceptional resolution, a significant advancement from traditional food web reconstruction. Further, this method allows us to pinpoint the trophic niche of species with niche-based modelling, even across hyperdiverse species assemblages such as coral reefs. In conjunction with complementary techniques such as stable isotope analysis, applying metabarcoding to whole communities will provide unparalleled information about energy and nutrient fluxes and inform their susceptibility to disturbances even in the world's most diverse ecosystems.
Data from: Moving beyond linear food chains: trait-mediated indirect interactions in a rocky intertidal food web
In simple, linear food chains, top predators can have positive indirect effects on basal resources by causing changes in the traits (e.g. behaviour, feeding rates) of intermediate consumers. Although less is known about trait-mediated indirect interactions (TMIIs) in more complex food webs, it has been suggested that such complexity dampens trophic cascades. We examined TMIIs between a predatory crab (Carcinus maenas) and two ecologically important basal resources, fucoid algae (Ascophyllum nodosum) and barnacles (Semibalanus balanoides), which are consumed by herbivorous (Littorina littorea) and carnivorous (Nucella lapillus) snails, respectively. Because crab predation risk suppresses snail feeding rates, we hypothesized that crabs would also shape direct and indirect interactions among the multiple consumers and resources. We found that the magnitude of TMIIs between the crab and each resource depended on the suite of intermediate consumers present in the food web. Carnivorous snails (Nucella) transmitted TMIIs between crabs and barnacles. However, crab–algae TMIIs were transmitted by both herbivorous (Littorina) and carnivorous (Nucella) snails, and these TMIIs were additive. By causing Nucella to consume fewer barnacles, crab predation risk allowed fucoids that had settled on or between barnacles to remain in the community. Hence, positive interactions between barnacles and algae caused crab–algae TMIIs to be strongest when both consumers were present. Studies of TMIIs in more realistic, reticulate food webs will be necessary for a more complete understanding of how predation risk shapes community dynamics.
Data from: Out-of-sample predictions from plant–insect food webs: robustness to missing and erroneous trophic interaction records
With increasing biotic introductions, there is a great need for predictive tools to anticipate which new trophic interactions will develop and which will not. Phylogenetic constraint of interactions in both native and novel food webs can make some novel interactions predictable. However, many food webs are sparsely sampled, or may include inaccurate interactions. In such cases, it is unclear whether modeling methods are still useful to anticipate novel interactions. We ran bootstrap simulations of host-use models on a Lepidoptera–plant data set to remove native trophic records or add erroneous records in order to observe the effect of missing or erroneous data on the prediction of interactions with novel plants. We found that the model was robust to a large amount of missing interaction records, but lost predictive power with the addition of relatively few erroneous interaction records. The loss of predictive power with missing records was due to inaccuracy in estimating phylogenetic distance between native and novel hosts. Removal of interaction records proportionally to their encounter frequency in the field had little effect on the loss of predictive power. Host-use models may have immediate value for predicting novel interactions from large, but sparsely sampled databases of trophic interactions.
Data from: Detailed food web networks of three Greater Antillean coral reef systems: the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica
Food webs represent one of the most complex aspects of community biotic interactions. Complex food webs are represented as networks of interspecific interactions, where nodes represent species or groups of species, and links are predator-prey interactions. This paper presents reconstructions of coral reef food webs in three Greater Antillean regions of the Caribbean: the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica. Though not taxonomically comprehensive, each food web nevertheless comprises producers and consumers, single-celled and multicellular organisms, and species foraging on reefs and adjacent seagrass beds. Species are grouped into trophic guilds if their prey and predator links are indistinguishable. The data list guilds, taxonomic composition, prey guilds/species, and predators. Primary producer and invertebrate richness are regionally uniform, but vertebrate richness varies on the basis of more detailed occurrence data. Each region comprises 169 primary producers, 513 protistan and invertebrate consumer species, and 159, 178, and 170 vertebrate species in the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica, respectively. Caribbean coral reefs are among the world's most endangered by anthropogenic activities. The datasets presented here will facilitate comparisons of historical and regional variation, the assessment of impacts of species loss and invasion, and the application of food webs to ecosystem analyses.
Data from: Estimating contributions of pelagic and benthic pathways to consumer production in coupled marine food webs
1. Pelagic and benthic systems usually interact, but their dynamics and production rates differ. Such differences influence the distribution, reproductive cycles, growth rates, stability and productivity of the consumers they support. Consumer preferences for, and dependence on, pelagic or benthic production are governed by the availability of these sources of production and consumer life history, distribution, habitat, behavioural ecology, ontogenetic stage and morphology. 2. Diet studies may demonstrate the extent to which consumers feed on prey in pelagic or benthic environments. But they do not discriminate benthic production directly supported by phytoplankton from benthic production recycled through detrital pathways. The former will track the dynamics of phytoplankton production more closely than the latter. 3. We develop and apply a new analytical method that uses carbon (C) and sulfur (S) natural abundance stable isotope data to assess the relative contribution of pelagic and benthic pathways to fish consumer production. 4. For 13 species of fish that dominate community biomass in the northern North Sea (estimated >90% of total biomass), relative modal use of pelagic pathways ranged from <25% to >85%. Use of both C and S isotopes as opposed to just C reduced uncertainty in relative modal use estimates. Temporal comparisons of relative modal use of pelagic and benthic pathways revealed similar ranking of species dependency over four years, but annual variation in relative modal use within species was typically 10-40%. 5. For the total fish consumer biomass in the study region, the C and S method linked approximately 70% and 30% of biomass to pelagic and benthic pathways respectively. As well as providing a new method to define consumers' links to pelagic and benthic pathways our results demonstrate that a substantial proportion of fish biomass, and by inference production, in the northern North Sea is supported by production that has passed through transformations on the seabed.
Data from: Soil fertility shapes belowground food webs across a regional climate gradient
Changes in soil fertility during pedogenesis affect the quantity and quality of resources entering the belowground subsystem. Climate governs pedogenesis, yet how climate modulates responses of soil food webs to soil ageing remains unexplored because of the paucity of appropriate model systems. We characterised soil food webs along each of four retrogressive soil chronosequences situated across a strong regional climate gradient to show that belowground communities are predominantly shaped by changes in fertility rather than climate. Basal consumers showed hump-shaped responses to soil ageing, which were propagated to higher-order consumers. There was a shift in dominance from bacterial to fungal energy channels with increasing soil age, while the root energy channel was most important in intermediate-aged soils. Our study highlights the overarching importance of soil fertility in regulating soil food webs, and indicates that belowground food webs will respond more strongly to shifts in soil resources than climate change.
Data from: Do differences in food web structure between organic and conventional farms affect the ecosystem service of pest control?
While many studies have demonstrated that organic farms support greater levels of biodiversity, it is not known whether this translates into better provision of ecosystem services. Here we use a food-web approach to analyse the community structure and function at the whole-farm scale. Quantitative food webs from 10 replicate pairs of organic and conventional farms showed that organic farms have significantly more species at three trophic levels (plant, herbivore and parasitoid) and significantly different network structure. Herbivores on organic farms were attacked by more parasitoid species on organic farms than on conventional farms. However, differences in network structure did not translate into differences in robustness to simulated species loss and we found no difference in percentage parasitism (natural pest control) across a variety of host species. Furthermore, a manipulative field experiment demonstrated that the higher species richness of parasitoids on the organic farms did not increase mortality of a novel herbivore used to bioassay ecosystem service. The explanation for these differences is likely to include inherent differences in management strategies and landscape structure between the two farming systems.
Data from: Genetic specificity of a plant-insect food web: implications for linking genetic variation to network complexity
Theory predicts that intraspecific genetic variation can increase the complexity of an ecological network. To date, however, we are lacking empirical knowledge of the extent to which genetic variation determines the assembly of ecological networks, as well as how the gain or loss of genetic variation will affect network structure. To address this knowledge gap, we used a common garden experiment to quantify the extent to which heritable trait variation in a host plant determines the assembly of its associated insect food web (network of trophic interactions). We then used a resampling procedure to simulate the additive effects of genetic variation on overall food-web complexity. We found that trait variation among host-plant genotypes was associated with resistance to insect herbivores, which indirectly affected interactions between herbivores and their insect parasitoids. Direct and indirect genetic effects resulted in distinct compositions of trophic interactions associated with each host-plant genotype. Moreover, our simulations suggest that food-web complexity would increase by 20% over the range of genetic variation in the experimental population of host plants. Taken together, our results indicate that intraspecific genetic variation can play a key role in structuring ecological networks, which may in turn affect network persistence.
Data from: Highly resolved early Eocene food webs show development of modern trophic structure after the end-Cretaceous extinction
Generalities of food web structure have been identified for extant ecosystems. However, the trophic organization of ancient ecosystems is unresolved, as prior studies of fossil webs have been limited by low-resolution, high-uncertainty data. We compiled highly resolved, well-documented feeding interaction data for 700 taxa from the 48 million-year-old latest early Eocene Messel Shale, which contains a species assemblage that developed after an interval of protracted environmental and biotal change during and following the end-Cretaceous extinction. We compared the network structure of Messel lake and forest food webs to extant webs using analyses that account for scale dependence of structure with diversity and complexity. The Messel lake web, with 94 taxa, displays unambiguous similarities in structure to extant webs. While the Messel forest web, with 630 taxa, displays differences compared to extant webs, they appear to result from high diversity and resolution of insect–plant interactions, rather than substantive differences in structure. The evidence presented here suggests that modern trophic organization developed along with the modern Messel biota during an 18 Myr interval of dramatic post-extinction change. Our study also has methodological implications, as the Messel forest web analysis highlights limitations of current food web data and models.
Data from: Molecular detection of trophic links in a complex insect host-parasitoid food web
Previously, host-parasitoid links have been unveiled almost exclusively by time-intensive rearing, while molecular methods were used only in simple agricultural host-parasitoid systems in the form of species specific primers. Here we present a general method for molecular detection of these links applied to a complex caterpillar-parasitoid food web from tropical rainforest of Papua New Guinea. We DNA barcoded hosts, parasitoids and their tissue remnants and matched the sequences to our extensive library of local species. We were thus able to match 87% of host sequences and 36% of parasitoid sequences to species, and infer subfamily or family in almost all cases. Our analysis affirmed 93 hitherto unknown trophic links between 37 host species from a wide range of Lepidoptera families and 46 parasitoid species from Hymenoptera and Diptera by identifying DNA sequences for both the host and the parasitoid involved in the interaction. Molecular detection proved especially useful in cases where distinguishing host species in caterpillar stage was difficult morphologically, or when the caterpillar died during rearing. We have even detected a case of extreme parasitoid specialization in a pair of Choreutis species which do not differ in caterpillar morphology and ecology. Using the molecular approach outlined here leads to better understanding of parasitoid host specificity, opens new possibilities for rapid surveys of food web structure and allows inference of species associations not already anticipated.
Data from: Inferring predator-prey interactions in food webs
1. Food webs are a powerful way to represent the diversity, structure, and function of ecological systems. However, the accurate description of food webs requires significant effort in time and resources, limiting their widespread use in ecological studies. Newly published methods allow for the inference of feeding interactions using proxy variables. Here, we compare the accuracy of two recently described methods, as well as describe a composite model of the two, for the inference of feeding interactions using a large, well-described dataset. 2. Both niche and neutral processes are involved in determining whether or not two species will form a feeding link in communities. Three different models for determining niche constraints of feeding interactions are compared, and all three models are extended by incorporating neutral processes, based on relative abundances. The three models compared here infer niche processes through 1) phylogenetic relationships, 2) local species trait distributions (e.g. body size), and 3) a composite of phylogeny and local traits. 3. We show that all three methods perform well at predicting individual species interactions, and that these individual predictions scale up to the network level, resulting in food-web structure of inferred networks being similar to their empirical counterparts. 4. Our results indicate that inferring food-web structure using phylogenies can be an efficient way of getting summary webs with minimal data, and offers a conservative test of changes in food-web structure, particularly when there is low species turnover between sites. Inferences made using traits requires more data, but allows for greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying trophic interactions. A composite model of the two methods provides a framework for investigating the importance of how phylogeny, trait distributions, and relative abundances, affect species interactions, and network structure.
Data from: How common road salts and organic additives alter freshwater food webs: in search of safer alternatives
The application of deicing road salts began in the 1940s and has increased drastically in regions where snow and ice removal is critical for transportation safety. The most commonly applied road salt is sodium chloride (NaCl). However, the increased costs of NaCl, its negative effects on human health, and the degradation of roadside habitats has driven transportation agencies to seek alternative road salts and organic additives to reduce the application rate of NaCl or increase its effectiveness. Few studies have examined the effects of NaCl in aquatic ecosystems, but none have explored the potential impacts of road salt alternatives or additives on aquatic food webs. We assessed the effects of three road salts (NaCl, MgCl2 and ClearLane™) and two road salts mixed with organic additives (GeoMelt™ and Magic Salt™) on food webs in experimental aquatic communities, with environmentally relevant concentrations, standardized by chloride concentration. We found that NaCl had few effects on aquatic communities. However, the microbial breakdown of organic additives initially reduced dissolved oxygen. Additionally, microbial activity likely transformed unusable phosphorus from the organic additives to usable phosphorus for algae, which increased algal growth. The increase in algal growth led to an increase in zooplankton abundance. Finally, MgCl2 – a common alternative to NaCl – reduced compositional differences of zooplankton, and at low concentrations increased the abundance of amphipods. Synthesis and applications. Our results indicate that alternative road salts (to NaCl), and road salt additives can alter the abundance and composition of organisms in freshwater food webs at multiple trophic levels, even at low concentrations. Consequently, road salt alternatives and additives might alter ecosystem function and ecosystem services. Therefore, transportation agencies should use caution in applying road salt alternatives and additives. A comprehensive investigation of road salt alternatives and road salt additives should be conducted before wide-scale use is implemented. Further research is also needed to determine the impacts of salt additives and alternatives on higher trophic levels, such as amphibians and fish.
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Allen Brain Atlas
Allen Brain Atlas is an Allen Institute collection of brain map atlases, datasets, APIs, and analysis tools covering mouse, human, and non-human primate brain resources.
Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
ABODe is a University of Edinburgh DataShare dataset for behavior classification in group-housed mice using home-cage video, identities, bounding boxes, ground-plate positions, and annotator labels.
DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
DANDI is a BRAIN Initiative archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data, including electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral data packaged as NWB and related standards.
International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.