Potential extinction cascades in a desert ecosystem: Linking food web interactions to community viability.

ABSTRACT: Desert communities are threatened with species loss due to climate change, and their resistance to such losses is unknown. We constructed a food web of the Mojave Desert terrestrial community (300 nodes, 4080 edges) to empirically examine the potential cascading effects of bird extinctions on this desert network, compared to losses of mammals and lizards. We focused on birds because they are already disappearing from the Mojave, and their relative thermal vulnerabilities are known. We quantified bottom-up secondary extinctions and evaluated the relative resistance of the community to losses of each vertebrate group. The impact of random bird species loss was relatively low compared to the consequences of mammal (causing the greatest number of cascading losses) or reptile loss, and birds we

SUBMITTER: Eichenwald AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10867880 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature