Animal diversity and ecosystem functioning in dynamic food webs

Florian D. Schneider (), Ulrich Brose, Björn C. Rall and Christian Guill
Additional contact information
Florian D. Schneider: Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution (ISEM), Université Montpellier
Ulrich Brose: German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Björn C. Rall: German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Christian Guill: Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Species diversity is changing globally and locally, but the complexity of ecological communities hampers a general understanding of the consequences of animal species loss on ecosystem functioning. High animal diversity increases complementarity of herbivores but also increases feeding rates within the consumer guild. Depending on the balance of these counteracting mechanisms, species-rich animal communities may put plants under top-down control or may release them from grazing pressure. Using a dynamic food-web model with body-mass constraints, we simulate ecosystem functions of 20,000 communities of varying animal diversity. We show that diverse animal communities accumulate more biomass and are more exploitative on plants, despite their higher rates of intra-guild predation. However, they do not reduce plant biomass because the communities are composed of larger, and thus energetically more efficient, plant and animal species. This plasticity of community body-size structure reconciles the debate on the consequences of animal species loss for primary productivity.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12718 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms12718

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12718

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().