Gastrointestinal morphology is an effective functional dietary proxy that predicts small mammal community structure.

ABSTRACT: The availability and quality of food resources can alter the intensity of competition and predation pressure within communities. Understanding species capacity to respond to global change-driven shifts in resource distribution is therefore crucial for biodiversity conservation. Small mammal communities are often structured by competition for food resources, but understanding and monitoring these processes are currently hindered by lack of functional dietary trait information in these hard-to-sample systems. In this study, we collected a comprehensive suite of gastrointestinal (GI) measurements from 26 small mammal species (including some never reported), compared them with more traditional craniodental traits in predicting dietary guild, and used them in a novel way to understand how diet

SUBMITTER: Chapman OS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11610690 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature