Beyond body size-new traits for new heights in trait-based modelling of predator-prey dynamics.

ABSTRACT: Food webs map feeding interactions among species, providing a valuable tool for understanding and predicting community dynamics. Using species' body sizes is a promising avenue for parameterizing food-web models, but such approaches have not yet been able to fully recover observed community dynamics. Such discrepancies suggest that traits other than body size also play important roles. For example, differences in species' use of microhabitat or non-consumptive effects of intraguild predators may affect dynamics in ways not captured by body size. In Laubmeier et al. (2018), we developed a dynamic food-web model incorporating microhabitat and non-consumptive predator effects in addition to body size, and used simulations to suggest an optimal sampling design of a mesocosm experiment to test

SUBMITTER: Wootton KL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9302725 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature