Delineating reef fish trophic guilds with global gut content data synthesis and phylogeny.

ABSTRACT: Understanding species' roles in food webs requires an accurate assessment of their trophic niche. However, it is challenging to delineate potential trophic interactions across an ecosystem, and a paucity of empirical information often leads to inconsistent definitions of trophic guilds based on expert opinion, especially when applied to hyperdiverse ecosystems. Using coral reef fishes as a model group, we show that experts disagree on the assignment of broad trophic guilds for more than 20% of species, which hampers comparability across studies. Here, we propose a quantitative, unbiased, and reproducible approach to define trophic guilds and apply recent advances in machine learning to predict probabilities of pairwise trophic interactions with high accuracy. We synthesize data from commun

SUBMITTER: Parravicini V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7793298 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature