Metapopulation capacity determines food chain length in fragmented landscapes.
| Autor: | Wang S; Institute of Ecology, Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, 100871 Beijing, China; shaopeng.wang@pku.edu.cn., Brose U; EcoNetLab, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.; Institute of Biodiversity, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany., van Nouhuys S; Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Program, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland.; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853., Holt RD; Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611., Loreau M; Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS, Moulis 09200, France. |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A] 2021 Aug 24; Vol. 118 (34). |
| DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.2102733118 |
| Abstrakt: | Metapopulation capacity provides an analytic tool to quantify the impact of landscape configuration on metapopulation persistence, which has proven powerful in biological conservation. Yet surprisingly few efforts have been made to apply this approach to multispecies systems. Here, we extend metapopulation capacity theory to predict the persistence of trophically interacting species. Our results demonstrate that metapopulation capacity could be used to predict the persistence of trophic systems such as prey-predator pairs and food chains in fragmented landscapes. In particular, we derive explicit predictions for food chain length as a function of metapopulation capacity, top-down control, and population dynamical parameters. Under certain assumptions, we show that the fraction of empty patches for the basal species provides a useful indicator to predict the length of food chains that a fragmented landscape can support and confirm this prediction for a host-parasitoid interaction. We further show that the impact of habitat changes on biodiversity can be predicted from changes in metapopulation capacity or approximately by changes in the fraction of empty patches. Our study provides an important step toward a spatially explicit theory of trophic metacommunities and a useful tool for predicting their responses to habitat changes. Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest. (Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.) |
| Databáze: | MEDLINE |
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