Traits of litter-dwelling forest arthropod predators and detritivores covary spatially with traits of their resources.

ABSTRACT: The functional trait approach proposes that relating traits of organisms within a community to variation in abiotic and biotic characteristics of their environment will provide insight on the mechanisms of community assembly. As traits at a given trophic level might act as filters for the selection of traits at another trophic level, we hypothesized that traits of consumers and of their resources covary in space. We evaluated complementary predictions about top-down (negative) and bottom-up (positive) trait covariation in a detrital food web. Additionally, we tested whether positive trait covariation was better explained by the Resource Concentration Hypothesis (i.e., most commonly represented trait values attract abundant consumers) or the Resource Specialization Hypothesis (i.e., resourc

SUBMITTER: Brousseau PM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6852231 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature