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14 results for “food chain length”
Food-chain length in desert streams of central and southern Arizona, USA
## overview Food chain length (FCL) is a key measure of the vertical structure of food webs that determines energy flow through ecosystems, carbon exchange between freshwater ecosystems and the atmosphere, and rates of nutrient cycling. FCL also has a strong bearing on the biomass of green plants in ecosystems and hence on water quality in aquatic ecosystems. Broad-scale syntheses of controls on FCL in stream ecosystems indicate that FCL declines with discharge variation but, counter to theory, does not vary significantly with energy supply. The mechanisms linking discharge and energy to FCL are largely unresolved in streams. We propose that lack of a relationship between energy supply and FCL may be due to variation in efficiency of energy transfer caused by constraints of food quality, or to a temporal mismatch between measures of energy inputs and FCL. Alternatively, the effects of flow variation on FCL may simply be paramount to energy supply, but potential mechanisms linking flow to FCL remain untested. Regime shifts—punctuated change between strings of high- and low-flow events—may cause comprehensive faunal replacement across trophic levels and collapse of the vertical structure of food webs. FCL may change as a result of loss (or gain) of an apex predator, or as a result of changes in feeding relationships leading to apex predators that eat higher on the food chain. Finally, flow variation may indirectly influence FCL through inputs of limiting nutrients during floods. In desert streams, algae typically provide the primary source of energy, and algal production is limited by nitrogen (N). N loading from terrestrial ecosystems is strongly related to flow variation, particularly to the inter-flood interval (IFI) or duration of baseflow between floods. Long IFI leads to larger N pulses and potentially greater net ecosystem production (NEP), thereby providing an indirect effect of flow variation on FCL. Specific aims of the research include: 1) Quantify the effe
Forest conversion to oil palm compresses food chain length in tropical streams
<b>Description: </b><p>Fish stable isotope data associated with the paper in Ecology. This includes bulk and compound specific stable isotope raw data for fish at 17 streams over 2 sampling years, across a land use gradient</p><p><b>Project: </b>This dataset was collected as part of the following SAFE research project: <a href="https://www.safeproject.net/projects/project_view/57"><b>Composition and abundance of tropical freshwater vertebrate communities across a land use gradient</b></a></p><p><b>Funding: </b>These data were collected as part of research funded by: </p><ul><li>Sime Darby Foundation (NA, NA)</li><li>Royal Geographic Society (RGS-IBG , PRA 01/16)</li><li>Royal Society (NA, NAF\R2\180791)</li><li>Singapore Ministry of Education (AcRF Tier 1 grant, R-154-000-A32-114)</li><li>Landmark Trust (Landmark Trust Futures Scheme , NA)</li></ul><p>This dataset is released under the CC-BY 4.0 licence, requiring that you cite the dataset in any outputs, but has the additional condition that you acknowledge the contribution of these funders in any outputs.</p><p></p><p><b>XML metadata: </b>GEMINI compliant metadata for this dataset is available <a href="https://www.safeproject.net/datasets/xml_metadata?id=3974971">here</a></p><p><b>Files: </b>This consists of 1 file: Fish_SIA_data2.xlsx</p><p><b>Fish_SIA_data2.xlsx</b></p><p>This file contains dataset metadata and 1 data tables:</p><ol><li><p><b>SIA_data</b> (described in worksheet Data)</p><p>Description: raw stable isotope fish data </p><p>Number of fields: 13</p><p>Number of data rows: 202</p><p>Fields: </p><ul><li><b>Date</b>: Date of sampling at each stream (Field type: date)</li><li><b>Stream</b>: Which stream was sampled (Field type: location)</li><li><b>Landuse</b>: Landuse of the stream sampled (Field type: categorical)</li><li><b>Species</b>: Species sampled (Field type: taxa)</li><li><b>SIA</b>: Was bulk or compound specific SIA used (Field type: categorical)</li><li><b>d15N_GLU</b>: d15N value of glutamic acid (Field type: numeric)</li><li><b>d15N_PHE</b>: d15N value of phenylalanine (Field type: numeric)</li><li><b>d13C_ILE</b>: d13C value of Isoleucine (Field type: numeric)</li><li><b>d13C_LEU</b>: d13C value of Leucine (Field type: numeric)</li><li><b>d13C_PHE</b>: d13C value of phenylalanine (Field type: numeric)</li><li><b>d13C_VAL</b>: d13C value of Valine (Field type: numeric)</li><li><b>D15N</b>: D15N (Field type: numeric)</li><li><b>D13C</b>: D13C (Field type: numeric)</li></ul></li></ol><p><b>Date range: </b>2015-03-01 to 2017-05-30</p><p><b>Latitudinal extent: </b>4.5770 to 4.9613</p><p><b>Longitudinal extent: </b>117.4441 to 117.8053</p><p><b>Taxonomic coverage: </b><br> All taxon names are validated against the GBIF backbone taxonomy. If a dataset uses a synonym, the accepted usage is shown followed by the dataset usage in brackets. Taxa that cannot be validated, including new species and other unknown taxa, morphospecies, functional groups and taxonomic levels not used in the GBIF backbone are shown in square brackets.</p><div> -  Animalia <br> -  -  Chordata <br> -  -  -  Actinopterygii <br> -  -  -  -  Cypriniformes <br> -  -  -  -  -  Cyprinidae <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Luciosoma</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Luciosoma pelligrinii</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Rasbora</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Rasbora pycnopeza</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Nematabramis</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Nematabramis everetti</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Hampala</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Hampala sabana</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Puntius</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Puntius sealei</i> (as synonym: <i>Barbodes sealei</i>)<br> -  -  -  -  Siluriformes <br> -  -  -  -  -  Clariidae <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Clarias</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Clarias anfractus</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  Bagridae <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Hemibagrus</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Hemibagrus baramensis</i> <br> -  -  -  -  Perciformes <br> -  -  -  -  -  Channidae <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Channa</i> <br> -  -  -  -  -  -  -  <i>Channa striata</i> <br></div><p></p>
Data From: Shortened food chain length in a fished versus unfished coral reef
<p>Direct exploitation through fishing is driving dramatic declines in wildlife populations in ocean environments, particularly for predatory and large-bodied taxa. Despite wide recognition of this pattern and well-established consequences of such trophic downgrading on ecosystem function, there have been few empirical studies examining the effects of fishing on whole system trophic architecture. Understanding these kinds of structural impacts is especially important in coral reef ecosystems - often heavily fished and facing multiple stressors. Given often high dietary flexibility and numerous functional redundancies, especially in diverse ecosystems such as coral reefs, it is important to establish if web architecture is strongly impacted by fishing pressure, or if it might be resilient, at least to moderate intensity pressure. To examine this question, we used a combination of bulk and compound-specific stable isotope analyses measured across a range of predatory and low trophic level consumers between two coral reef ecosystems that differed with respect to fishing pressure but otherwise remained largely similar. We find that even in a high diversity system with relatively modest fishing pressure, there are strong reductions in the trophic position of the three highest trophic position consumers examined in the fished system but no effects on the trophic position of lower-level consumers. We see no evidence that this shortening of these affected food webs is being driven by changes in basal resource consumption, e.g., through changes in spatial location of foraging by consumers. Instead, this likely reflects internal changes in food web architecture suggesting that even in diverse systems, and with relatively modest pressure, human harvest causes significant compressions in food chain length. This observed shortening of these food webs may have many important emergent ecological consequences for the functioning of ecosystems impacted by fishing or hunting. Such important structural shifts may be widespread but unnoticed by traditional surveys. This insight may also be useful for applied ecosystems managers grappling with choices about the relative importance of protection for remote and pristine areas and the value of strict no-take areas to protect not just the raw constituents of systems affected by fishing and hunting but also the health and functionality of whole systems.</p>
Towards a mechanistic understanding of variation in aquatic food chain length revealed by meta-analysis
<p><span>Ecologists have long sought to understand the forces determining food chain lengths (FCLs). Multiple hypotheses have proposed a diverse array of potential environmental determinants of FCL, typically including ecosystem size, resource productivity, and disturbance. Yet, many empirical studies have found that FCL responses to these environmental variables can be positive as well as negative. To explain such mixed responses, we develop a simple yet comprehensive, site-occupancy dynamic framework for complex food webs by integrating multiple environmental drivers. With the competition-colonization tradeoff among basal species, our model shows that increasing ecosystem size results in a monotonic increase in FCL as a whole, while FCL displays a non-linear, oscillatory response to resource productivity or disturbance in benign environments. These predictions are generally supported by our meta-analysis of an empirical dataset compiled from diverse aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, this unifying framework offers a novel mechanistic explanation for observed variation in FCLs driven by multiple environmental factors.</span></p>
You are what your host eats: The trophic structure and food chain length of a symbiont community are coupled with the plastic diet of the host ant
<p>Food chain length provides key information on the flow of nutrients and energy in ecosystems. Variation in food chain length has primarily been explained by environmental drivers such as ecosystem size and productivity. Most insights are obtained from theory or aquatic systems, but the importance of these drivers remains largely untested in terrestrial systems.</p> <p>We exploited red wood ant nests markedly differing in size as natural experiments to quantify the drivers of trophic structure and food chain length of their symbiont arthropod communities. Using stable isotopes, we explored the variation in the trophic positions of four symbiont species with the trophic position of the top predator as a proxy for food chain length of the symbiont community. </p> <p>Nest size did not affect food chain length, nor trophic distance between the symbionts. Instead, food chain length and the trophic positions of the symbionts were strongly affected by the host's foraging decisions. When the host diet shifted from predominantly herbivorous to more predacious, the trophic position of the symbionts and food chain length strongly increased.</p> <p>We show for the first time that a food web can be structured by biotic interactions with an engineering species rather than by abiotic environmental variable</p>
Towards a mechanistic understanding of variation in aquatic food chain length revealed by meta-analysis
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You are what your host eats: The trophic structure and food chain length of a symbiont community are coupled with the plastic diet of the host ant
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Data From: Shortened food chain length in a fished versus unfished coral reef
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Parasites in kelp-forest food webs increase food-chain length, complexity, and specialization, but reduce connectance
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Partial migration alters population ecology and food chain length: evidence from a salmonid fish
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Data from: Historical contingency and productivity effects on food-chain length
Food-chain length (FCL) is a fundamental ecosystem attribute, integrating information on both food web composition and ecosystem processes. It remains untested whether FCL also reflects the history of community assembly known to affect community composition and ecosystem functioning. Here, we performed microcosm experiments with a copepod (top predator), two ciliate species (intermediate consumers), and bacteria (producers), and modified the sequence of species introduction into the microcosm at four productivity levels to jointly test the effects of historical contingency and productivity on FCL. FCL increased when the top predator was introduced last; thus, the trophic position of the copepod reflected assembly history. A shorter FCL occurred at the highest productivity level, probably because the predator switched to feeding at the lower trophic levels because of the abundant basal resource. Thus, we present empirical evidence that FCL was determined by historical contingency, likely caused by priority effects, and by productivity.
Data from: Historical contingency and productivity effects on food-chain length
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Data from: Salinization triggers a trophic cascade in experimental freshwater communities with varying food-chain length
The application of road deicing salts in northern regions worldwide is changing the chemical environment of freshwater ecosystems. Chloride levels in many lakes, streams, and wetlands exceed the chronic and acute thresholds established by the United States and Canada for the protection of freshwater biota. Few studies have identified the impacts of deicing salts in stream and wetland communities and none have examined impacts in lake communities. We tested how relevant concentrations of road salt (15, 100, 250, 500, and 1000 mg Cl− L−1) interacted with experimental communities containing two or three trophic levels (i.e. no fish vs. predatory fish). We hypothesized that road salt and fish would have a negative synergistic effect on zooplankton, which would then induce a trophic cascade. We tested this hypothesis in outdoor mesocosms containing filamentous algae, periphyton, phytoplankton, zooplankton, several macroinvertebrate species, and fish. We found that the presence of fish and high salt had a negative synergistic effect on the zooplankton community, which in turn caused an increase in phytoplankton. Contributing to the magnitude of this trophic cascade was a direct positive effect of high salinity on phytoplankton abundance. Cascading effects were limited with respect to impacts on the benthic food web. Periphyton and snail grazers were unaffected by the salt-induced trophic cascade, but the biomass of filamentous algae decreased as a result of shading effects from phytoplankton. We also found direct negative effects of high salinity on the biomass of filamentous algae and amphipods (Hyalella azteca) and the mortality of banded mystery snails (Viviparus georgianus) and fingernail clams (Sphaerium simile). Clam mortality was dependent on the presence of fish, suggesting a non-consumptive interactive effect with salt. Our results indicate that globally increasing concentrations of road salt can alter community structure via both direct and indirect effects.
Data from: Salinization triggers a trophic cascade in experimental freshwater communities with varying food-chain length
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