Testing for top-down cascading effects in a biomass-driven ecological network of soil invertebrates.

ABSTRACT: To investigate the structural changes of a food-web architecture, we considered real data coming from a soil food web in one abandoned pasture with former low-pressure agriculture management and we reproduced the corresponding ecological network within a multi-agent fully programmable modeling environment in order to simulate dynamically the cascading effects due to the removal of entire functional guilds.We performed several simulations differing from each other for the functional implications. At the first trophic level, we simulated a removal of the prey, that is, herbivores and microbivores, while at the second trophic level, we simulated a removal of the predators, that is, omnivores and carnivores. The five main guilds were removed either separately or in combination.The alteration i

SUBMITTER: Conti E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7391537 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature