Blue and green food webs respond differently to elevation and land use
- Hsi-Cheng Ho
- 2022年12月24日
- 讀畢需時 2 分鐘
While aquatic (blue) and terrestrial (green) food webs are parts of the same landscape, it remains unclear whether they respond similarly to shared environmental gradients. We use empirical community data from hundreds of sites across Switzerland, and show that blue and green food webs have different structural and ecological properties along elevation as a temperature proxy, and among various land-use types. Specifically, in green food webs, their modular structure increases with elevation and the overlap of consumers9 diet niche decreases, while the opposite pattern is observed in blue food webs. Such differences between blue and green food webs are particularly pronounced in farmland-dominated habitats, indicating that anthropogenic habitat modification moderates the climatic effects on food webs but differently in blue versus green systems. These findings indicate general structural differences between blue and green food webs and suggest their potential divergent future alterations through land use or climatic changes.
a The principal component analysis reveals distinct structures between the terrestrial (green) and aquatic (blue) food webs, indicated by dot colours. b The potential dependencies between elevation and food-web properties (brown arrows), as well as among food-web properties themselves (yellow arrows), for the piecewise structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis. c The outcomes of piecewise SEM standardised coefficients and R-squared of the green and blue food webs (indicated by block colours), respectively. Positive paths in black, negative in red, marginal-significant as dashed, and non-significant in grey. A path’s width is proportional to its size of standardised coefficient.
Published in Nature Communications, 2022
Authors: Hsi-Cheng Ho, Jakob Brodersen, Martin M. Gossner, Catherine H. Graham, Silvana Kaeser, Merin Reji Chacko, Ole Seehausen, Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Loïc Pellissier & Florian Altermatt
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