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1. Nutritional support of inland aquatic food webs by aged carbon and organic matter: Aged nutritional support of inland aquatic food webs

   https://doi.org/10.1002/lol2.10044  

   Bellamy, Amber R. ; Bauer, James E. ( October 2017 , Limnology and Oceanography Letters)
2. River food webs: an integrative approach to bottom-up flow webs, top-down impact webs, and trophic position

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2228  

   Benke, Arthur C. ( June 2018 , Ecology)
3. Trophic differences regulate grassland food webs: herbivores track food quality and predators select for habitat volume

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3453  

   Prather, Rebecca M. ; Welti, Ellen A. R. ; Kaspari, Michael ( August 2021 , Ecology)

   The impacts of altered biogeochemical cycles on ecological systems are likely to vary with trophic level. Predicting how these changes will affect ecological food webs is further complicated by human activities, which are simultaneously altering the availability of macronutrients like nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), and micronutrients such as sodium (Na). Here we contrast three hypotheses that predict how increasing nutrient availability will shape grassland food webs. We conducted a distributed factorial fertilization experiment (N and P crossed with NaCl) across four North American grasslands, quantifying the responses of aboveground plant biomass and volume, plant tissue and soil elemental concentrations, as well as the abundance of five arthropod functional groups. Fertilization with N and P increased plant biomass and foliar N and P concentrations in grasses but not forbs. Fertilization with Na had no effect on plant biomass but increased foliar Na concentrations. Consistent with the nutrient limitation hypothesis, we found strong evidence of nutrient limitation for insect herbivores across the four sites with sucking (phloem and xylem feeding) herbivores increasing in abundance with NP fertilization and chewing herbivores increasing in response to both Na and NP fertilization, and a trend for increased response of arthropods to lower plant nutrient availability. We found no evidence for an interaction of NaCl and NP on arthropod abundance as predicted by the serial colimitation hypothesis. Finally, consistent with the ecosystem size hypothesis, predator and parasitoid abundances increased with plant volume, but not fertilization. Our results suggest these functional group‐specific responses to changes in plant nutrients and structure are key to predicting the future of grassland food webs in an era with increasing use of N and P fertilizers, and increasing terrestrial inputs of Na from road salt, saline irrigation water, and aerosols due to rising sea levels.

    

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4. Strong Seasonality in Arctic Estuarine Microbial Food Webs

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.02628  

   Kellogg, Colleen T. ; McClelland, James W. ; Dunton, Kenneth H. ; Crump, Byron C. ( November 2019 , Frontiers in Microbiology)
5. Disentangling ecological and taphonomic signals in ancient food webs

   https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2020.59  

   Shaw, Jack O. ; Coco, Emily ; Wootton, Kate ; Daems, Dries ; Gillreath-Brown, Andrew ; Swain, Anshuman ; Dunne, Jennifer A. ( August 2021 , Paleobiology)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Analyses of ancient food webs reveal important paleoecological processes and responses to a range of perturbations throughout Earth's history, such as climate change. These responses can inform our forecasts of future biotic responses to similar perturbations. However, previous analyses of ancient food webs rarely accounted for key differences between modern and ancient community data, particularly selective loss of soft-bodied taxa during fossilization. To consider how fossilization impacts inferences of ancient community structure, we (1) analyzed node-level attributes to identify correlations between ecological roles and fossilization potential and (2) applied selective information loss procedures to food web data for extant systems. We found that selective loss of soft-bodied organisms has predictable effects on the trophic structure of “artificially fossilized” food webs because these organisms occupy unique, consistent food web positions. Fossilized food webs misleadingly appear less stable (i.e., more prone to trophic cascades), with less predation and an overrepresentation of generalist consumers. We also found that ecological differences between soft- and hard-bodied taxa—indicated by distinct positions in modern food webs—are recorded in an early Eocene web, but not in Cambrian webs. This suggests that ecological differences between the groups have existed for ≥48 Myr. Our results indicate that accounting for soft-bodied taxa is vital for accurate depictions of ancient food webs. However, the consistency of information loss trends across the analyzed food webs means it is possible to predict how the selective loss of soft-bodied taxa affects food web metrics, which can permit better modeling of ancient communities. 

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