Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 283, Issue 1825, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.2569
Keywords
regime shift; complex adaptive systems; exponential random graph model; Baltic Sea; food web; motifs
Categories
Funding
- Norden Top-level Research Initiative sub-programme 'Effect Studies and Adaptation to Climate Change'
- MISTRA
- strategic research program Ekoklim at Stockholm University
- Abo Akademi University Endowment
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Species composition and habitats are changing at unprecedented rates in the world's oceans, potentially causing entire food webs to shift to structurally and functionally different regimes. Despite the severity of these regime shifts, elucidating the precise nature of their underlying processes has remained difficult. We address this challenge with a new analytic approach to detect and assess the relative strength of different driving processes in food webs. Our study draws on complexity theory, and integrates the network-centric exponential random graph modelling (ERGM) framework developed within the social sciences with community ecology. In contrast to previous research, this approach makes dear assumptions of direction of causality and accommodates a dynamic perspective on the emergence of food webs. We apply our approach to analysing food webs of the Baltic Sea before and after a previously reported regime shift. Our results show that the dominant food web processes have remained largely the same, although we detect changes in their magnitudes. The results indicate that the reported regime shift may not be a system-wide shift, but instead involve a limited number of species. Our study emphasizes the importance of community-wide analysis on marine regime shifts and introduces a novel approach to examine food webs.
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