Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 889-899Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.13966
Keywords
ecological networks; ecological predictions; food web; model transferability; terrestrial vertebrates; trait matching; trophic interactions
Categories
Funding
- ERA-Net BiodivERsA - Belmont Forum [ANR-18-EBI4-0009]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [RGPIN-2019-05771]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Despite limited knowledge, predicting species interactions based on functional traits is a promising approach. A new traits-based model of trophic interactions for European vertebrates was built, and even with minimal input data, the full European vertebrate food web could be reasonably estimated. However, predators were easier to predict than prey, and local food web connectivity was often overestimated.
We have very limited knowledge of how species interact in most communities and ecosystems despite trophic relationships being fundamental for linking biodiversity to ecosystem functioning. A promising approach to fill this gap is to predict interactions based on functional traits, but many questions remain about how well we can predict interactions for different taxa, ecosystems and amounts of input data. Here, we built a new traits-based model of trophic interactions for European vertebrates and found that even models calibrated with 0.1% of the interactions (100 out of 71 k) estimated the full European vertebrate food web reasonably well. However, predators were easier to predict than prey, especially for some clades (e.g. fowl and storks) and local food web connectance was consistently overestimated. Our results demonstrate the ability to rapidly generate food webs when empirical data are lacking-an important step towards a more complete and spatially explicit description of food webs.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available