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Research on the ecology of top predators – upper trophic level consumers that are relatively free from predation once they reach adult size – has provided regular contributions to general ecology and is a rapidly expanding and increasingly experimental, multidisciplinary and technological endeavour. Yet, an exponentially expanding literature coupled with rapid disintegration into specialized, disconnected...
Food web topologies depict the community structure as distributions of feeding interactions across populations. Although the soil ecosystem provides important functions for aboveground ecosystems, data on complex soil food webs is notoriously scarce, most likely due to the difficulty of sampling and characterizing the system. To fill this gap we assembled the complex food webs of 48 forest soil communities...
Human impact on structure and functioning of ecosystems is rapidly increasing. Virtually all European forests are managed with major implications for diversity and structure of food webs. Centipedes (Chilopoda: Lithobiidae) are abundant arthropod predators in European temperate forest soils with a generalistic feeding behaviour. However, little is known on the variability in the prey spectrum of centipedes...
Pollen quantity limitation has been widely recognized as one of the main causes of plant reproductive failure in nature. However, its negative effects on fruit and seed production have been often confounded with those of low pollen quality (i.e. low conspecific pollen viability and/or slow pollen tube growth rate). The lack of differentiation between these two aspects of pollen limitation has resulted...
Soil systems maintain important ecosystem processes crucial for plant life and food production. Especially agricultural systems are strongly affected by climate change due to low vegetation cover associated with high temperatures and drought. Nevertheless, the response of soil systems to climate change is little explored. We used microcosms with a simplified soil community to address effects of climate...
Anthropogenic land use shapes the dynamics and composition of central European forests and changes the quality and availability of resources of the decomposer system. These changes likely alter the structure and functioning of soil animal food webs. Using stable isotope analysis (13C, 15N) we investigated the trophic position and resource use of soil animal species in each of four forest types (coniferous,...
The positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is mainly derived from studies concerning primary producers, whereas a generalization of this relationship for higher trophic levels is more difficult. Furthermore, most evidence of the biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationship is derived from experiments manipulating only one trophic level and, as a consequence, interactive...
Ecological interaction networks, such as those describing the mutualistic interactions between plants and their pollinators or between plants and their frugivores, exhibit non‐random structural properties that cannot be explained by simple models of network formation. One factor affecting the formation and eventual structure of such a network is its evolutionary history. We argue that this, in many...
Nematodes are the most abundant invertebrates in soils and are key prey in soil food webs. Uncovering their contribution to predator nutrition is essential for understanding the structure of soil food webs and the way energy channels through soil systems. Molecular gut content analysis of consumers of nematodes, such as soil microarthropods, using specific DNA markers is a novel approach for studying...
Understanding the responses of ecological communities to perturbation is a key challenge within contemporary ecology research. In this study we seek to separate specific community responses from general community responses of plant communities to exclusion of large cervid herbivores. Cervid herbivory and forestry are the main drivers of vegetation structure and diversity in boreal forests. While many...
To maintain constant chemical composition, i.e. elemental homeostasis, organisms have to consume resources of sufficient quality to meet their own specific stoichiometric demand. Therefore, concentrations of elements indicate resource quality, and rare elements in the environment may act as limiting factors for individual organisms scaling up to constrain population densities. We investigated how...
Predation is an important ecological factor driving animal population structures, community assemblages and consequently ecosystem stability and biodiversity. Many environmental factors influence direction and intensity of predation, suggesting that trophic linkages between animals vary between different habitats. This in consequence has particular relevance in anthropogenically altered habitats such...
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