1,720,986 research outputs found
Unravelling the complex structure of forest soil food webs: higher omnivory and more trophic levels
No full textFood 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. The food webs comprise 89 to 168 taxa and 729 to 3344 feeding interactions. The feeding links were established by combining several molecular methods (stable isotope, fatty acid and molecular gut content analyses) with feeding trials and literature data. First, we addressed whether soil food webs (n = 48) differ significantly from those of other ecosystem types (aquatic and terrestrial aboveground, n = 77) by comparing 22 food web parameters. We found that our soil food webs are characterized by many omnivorous and cannibalistic species, more trophic chains and intraguild-predation motifs than other food webs and high average and maximum trophic levels. Despite this, we also found that soil food webs have a similar connectance as other ecosystems, but interestingly a higher link density and clustering coefficient. These differences in network structure to other ecosystem types may be a result of ecosystem specific constraints on hunting and feeding characteristics of the species that emerge as network parameters at the food-web level. In a second analysis of land-use effects, we found significant but only small differences of soil food web structure between different beech and coniferous forest types, which may be explained by generally strong selection effects of the soil that are independent of human land use. Overall, our study has unravelled some systematic structures of soil food-webs, which extends our mechanistic understanding how environmental characteristics of the soil ecosystem determine patterns at the community level.DFG [1374, BR 2315/7-2, BR 2315/13-2
Size-based food web characteristics govern the response to species extinctions
No full textHow ecological communities react to species extinctions is a long-standing yet current question in ecology. The species constituting the basic units of ecosystems interact with each other forming complex networks of trophic relationships and the characteristics of these networks are highly important for the consequences of species extinction. Here we take a more general approach and analyze a broad range of network characteristics and their role in determining food web susceptibility to secondary extinctions. We extend previous studies, that have focused on the consequences of topological and dynamical food web parameters for food web robustness, by also defining network-wide characteristics depending on the relationships between the distribution of species body masses and other species characteristics. We use a bioenergetic dynamical model to simulate realistically structured model food webs that differ in their structural and dynamical properties as well as their size structure. In order to measure food web robustness we calculated the proportion of species going secondarily extinct. A multiple regression analysis was then used to fit a general model relating the proportion of species going secondarily extinct to the measured food web properties. Our results show that there are multiple factors from all three groups of food web characteristics that affect food web robustness. However, we find the most striking effect was related to the body mass abundance relationship which points to the importance of body mass relationships for food web stability.ES
The susceptibility of species to extinctions in model communities
No full textDespite the fact that the loss of a species from a community has the potential to cause a dramatic decline in biodiversity, for example through cascades of secondary extinctions, little is known about the factors contributing to the extinction risk of any particular species. Here we expand earlier modeling approaches using a dynamic food-web model that accounts for bottom-up as well as top-down effects. We investigate what factors influence a species' extinction risk and time to extinction of the non-persistent species. We identified three basic properties that affect a species' risk of extinction. The highest extinction risk is born by species with (1) low energy input (e.g. high trophic level), (2) susceptibility to the loss of energy pathways (e.g. specialists with few prey species) and (3) dynamic instability (e.g. low Hill exponent and reliance on homogeneous energy channels when feeding on similarly sized prey). Interestingly, and different from field studies, we found that the trophic level and not the body mass of a species influences its extinction risk. On the other hand, body mass is the single most important factor determining the time to extinction of a species, resulting in small species dying first. This suggests that in the field the trophic level might have more influence on the extinction risk than presently recognized.ESF; German Research Foundation [BR 2315/13, BR 2315/11-1
Extinctions in Ecological Communities : direct and indirect effects of perturbation on biodiversity
No full textIn the dawning of what may become Earth’s 6th mass extinction the topic of this thesis, understanding extinction processes and what determines the magnitude of species loss, has become only too relevant. The number of known extinctions (~850) during the last centuries translates to extinction rates elevated above the background rate, matching those of previous mass extinction events. The main drivers of these extinctions have been human land use, introduction of exotic species and overexploitation. Under continued anthropogenic pressure and climate change, the current extinction rates are predicted to increase tenfold. Large perturbations, such as the extinction drivers mentioned above, affects species directly, causing a change in their abundance. As species are not isolated, but connected to each other through a multitude of interactions, the change in abundance of one species can in turn affect others. Thus, in addition to the direct effect, a perturbation can affect a species indirectly through the ecological network in which the species is embedded. With this thesis, I wish to contribute to our basic understanding of these indirect effects and the role they play in determining the magnitude of species loss. All the studies included here are so called in silico experiments, using mathematical models to describe ecological communities and computer simulations to observe the response of these communities to perturbation. When a perturbation is severe enough, a species will be driven to extinction. The loss of a species from a system is in itself a large perturbation, and may result in further extinctions, so called secondary extinctions. The traits of the species initially lost, can be a potential predictor of the magnitude of secondary species loss. In Paper I of this thesis, I show that when making such predictions, it is important to incorporate temporally dynamic species interactions and abundances, in order not to underestimate the importance of certain species, such as top predators. I further show that species traits alone are not particularly good predictors of secondary extinction risk (Paper I), but that in combination with community level properties they are (Paper II). Indeed, there seems to be an interaction such that the specific property making a community prone to secondary species loss, depends on what kind of species was lost in the primary extinction. As different types of perturbation put different types of species at risk of (primary) extinction, this means that the specific property making a community prone to secondary species loss, will depend on the type of perturbation the community is subjected to. One of the predicted main drivers of future species extinction is climate change. If the local climate becomes adverse, a species can either migrate to new and better areas or stay and evolve. Both these processes will be important in determining the magnitude of species loss under climate change. However, migration and evolution do not occur in vacuum – the biotic community in which these processes play out may modulate their effect on biodiversity. In paper III, I show that the strength of competition between species modulates the effect of both dispersal and evolution on the magnitude of species loss under climate change. The three-way interaction between interspecific competition, evolution and dispersal, creates a complex pattern of biodiversity responses, in which both evolution and dispersal can either increase or decrease the magnitude of species loss. Thus, when species interactions are incorporated, it is clear that even though migration and evolution may alleviate the impact of climate change for some species, they may indirectly aggravate the situation for others. In Paper III, the aspect of climate change incorporated in the model is an increase in mean annual temperature. But climate change is also predicted to increase environmental variability. Paper IV shows that species-rich communities are more sensitive to high environmental variability than species-poor ones. The smaller population sizes in the species-rich communities increased the extinction risk connected to population fluctuations driven by the variable environment. Hence, systems such as tropical forests and coral reefs are predicted to be particularly sensitive to the increased variability that may follow with climate change. In Paper IV, primary extinctions of primary producers result in extinction cascades of consumer species, when they lose their prey. However, in reality a consumer species might be able to switch to another prey, and such flexibility has both been observed and suggested as a potential rescue mechanism. But what is beneficial for an individual predator in the short-term can become detrimental to the ecological community in the long-term. Paper V shows that consumer flexibility often led to consumers continuously overexploiting their new prey, in the worst case to the point of system collapse. Thus, the suggested rescue mechanism aggravated the effect of initial species loss, rather than ameliorating it. Overall, the research presented here, underscores the importance of including population dynamics and biotic interactions when studying the effects of perturbation on biodiversity. Many of the results are complex, hard to foresee or even counter-intuitive, arising from the indirect effects of the perturbation being translated through the living web of species interactions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Robustness to secondary extinctions: Comparing trait-based sequential deletions in static and dynamic food webs
Full text linkThe loss of species from ecological communities can unleash a cascade of secondary extinctions, the risk and extent of which are likely to depend on the traits of the species that are lost from the community. To identify species traits that have the greatest impact on food web robustness to species loss we here subject allometrically scaled, dynamical food web models to several deletion sequences based on species’ connectivity, generality, vulnerability or body mass. Further, to evaluate the relative importance of dynamical to topological effects we compare robustness between dynamical and purely topological models. This comparison reveals that the topological approach overestimates robustness in general and for certain sequences in particular. Top-down directed sequences have no or very low impact on robustness in topological analyses, while the dynamical analysis reveals that they may be as important as high-impact bottom-up directed sequences. Moreover, there are no deletion sequences that result, on average, in no or very few secondary extinctions in the dynamical approach. Instead, the least detrimental sequence in the dynamical approach yields an average robustness similar to the most detrimental (non-basal) deletion sequence in the topological approach. Hence, a topological analysis may lead to erroneous conclusions concerning both the relative and the absolute importance of different species traits for robustness. The dynamical sequential deletion analysis shows that food webs are least robust to the loss of species that have many trophic links or that occupy low trophic levels. In contrast to previous studies we can infer, albeit indirectly, that secondary extinctions were triggered by both bottom-up and top-down cascades.funding agencies|European Science Foundation||German Research Foundation| BR 2315/11-1 |</p
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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