Climate change disproportionately increases herbivore over plant or parasitoid biomass.

ABSTRACT: All living organisms are linked through trophic relationships with resources and consumers, the balance of which determines overall ecosystem stability and functioning. Ecological research has identified a multitude of mechanisms that contribute to this balance, but ecologists are now challenged with predicting responses to global environmental changes. Despite a wealth of studies highlighting likely outcomes for specific mechanisms and subsets of a system (e.g., plants, plant-herbivore or predator-prey interactions), studies comparing overall effects of changes at multiple trophic levels are rare. We used a combination of experiments in a grassland system to test how biomass at the plant, herbivore and natural enemy (parasitoid) levels responds to the interactive effects of two key global

SUBMITTER: de Sassi C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3399892 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature