Journal
GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY
Volume 23, Issue 7, Pages 2629-2640Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13560
Keywords
biodiversity-ecosystem functioning; facilitation; functional response; global change; interference; multiple-predator effects; prey density; temperature
Funding
- 'Development of postdoc positions at University of South Bohemia' project [CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0049]
- Grant Agency of the Czech Republic [14-29857S]
- French Laboratory of Excellence Project 'TULIP' [ANR-10-LABX-41, ANR-11-IDEX-0002-02]
- European Union through PRESTIGE programme [PCOFUND-GA-2013-609102]
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Understanding the dependence of species interaction strengths on environmental factors and species diversity is crucial to predict community dynamics and persistence in a rapidly changing world. Nontrophic (e.g. predator interference) and trophic components together determine species interaction strengths, but the effects of environmental factors on these two components remain largely unknown. This impedes our ability to fully understand the links between environmental drivers and species interactions. Here, we used a dynamical modelling framework based on measured predator functional responses to investigate the effects of predator diversity, prey density, and temperature on trophic and nontrophic interaction strengths within a freshwater food web. We found that (i) species interaction strengths cannot be predicted from trophic interactions alone, (ii) nontrophic interaction strengths vary strongly among predator assemblages, (iii) temperature has opposite effects on trophic and nontrophic interaction strengths, and (iv) trophic interaction strengths decrease with prey density, whereas the dependence of nontrophic interaction strengths on prey density is concave up. Interestingly, the qualitative impacts of temperature and prey density on the strengths of trophic and nontrophic interactions were independent of predator identity, suggesting a general pattern. Our results indicate that taking multiple environmental factors and the nonlinearity of density-dependent species interactions into account is an important step towards a better understanding of the effects of environmental variations on complex ecological communities. The functional response approach used in this study opens new avenues for (i) the quantification of the relative importance of the trophic and nontrophic components in species interactions and (ii) a better understanding how environmental factors affect these interactions and the dynamics of ecological communities.
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