Rewiring and indirect effects underpin modularity reshuffling in a marine food web under environmental shifts.

ABSTRACT: Species are characterized by physiological and behavioral plasticity, which is part of their response to environmental shifts. Nonetheless, the collective response of ecological communities to environmental shifts cannot be predicted from the simple sum of individual species responses, since co-existing species are deeply entangled in interaction networks, such as food webs. For these reasons, the relation between environmental forcing and the structure of food webs is an open problem in ecology. To this respect, one of the main problems in community ecology is defining the role each species plays in shaping community structure, such as by promoting the subdivision of food webs in modules-that is, aggregates composed of species that more frequently interact-which are reported as community

SUBMITTER: D'Alelio D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6822054 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature