Abstract
AbstractTerrestrial ecosystems support rich communities of species feeding on each other in different ways. Insects and plants comprise much of this species richness, but the structure of their feeding interactions in aboveground terrestrial food webs is not well known. Historically, food web research has coarsely or unevenly grouped insects and plants, excluded “mutualistic” feeding interactions (e.g., pollinators eating nectar), and focused only on subsets of species or feeding interactions, especially “antagonistic” interactions involving tetrapods. Here, we combine public data and records from a biological research station into a cumulative food web of ∼580,000 interactions among ∼3,800 species in a temperate hardwood forest ecosystem. We include all feeding interactions, subdivided by whether animal tissues or plant leaves, flowers, fruits, or wood are being eaten. We represent these different types of feeding interactions in a multiplex food web and study the effect of taxonomic resolution on our understanding of food web structure. Our results indicate that insect herbivores engage in highly species– and tissue-specific feeding that is inaccurately represented by coarse taxonomic groups. The food web presented here is the richest and most evenly-resolved representation of feeding interactions yet reported and provides a tool for future management and research on terrestrial ecosystems.
Publisher
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cited by
1 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献