Top-down and bottom-up effects and relationships with local environmental factors in the water frog-helminth systems in Latvia.

ABSTRACT: Semi-aquatic European water frogs (Pelophylax spp.) harbour rich helminth infra-communities, whose effects on host population size in nature are poorly known. To study top-down and bottom-up effects, we conducted calling male water frog counts and parasitological investigations of helminths in waterbodies from different regions of Latvia, supplemented by descriptions of waterbody features and surrounding land use data. We performed a series of generalized linear model and zero-inflated negative binomial regressions to determine the best predictors for frog relative population size and helminth infra-communities. The highest-ranked (by Akaike information criterion correction, AICc) model explaining the water frog population size contained only waterbody variables, followed by the model cont

SUBMITTER: Ceirans A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10224975 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature