@article{StarkBachGuill2021,
  author    = {Stark, Markus and Bach, Moritz and Guill, Christian},
  title     = {Patch isolation and periodic environmental disturbances have idiosyncratic effects on local and regional population variabilities in meta-food chains},
  series = {Theoretical ecology},
  volume    = {14},
  journal   = {Theoretical ecology},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Dordrecht},
  issn      = {1874-1738},
  doi       = {10.1007/s12080-021-00510-0},
  pages     = {489 -- 500},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {While habitat loss is a known key driver of biodiversity decline, the impact of other landscape properties, such as patch isolation, is far less clear. When patch isolation is low, species may benefit from a broader range of foraging opportunities, but are at the same time adversely affected by higher predation pressure from mobile predators. Although previous approaches have successfully linked such effects to biodiversity, their impact on local and metapopulation dynamics has largely been ignored. Since population dynamics may also be affected by environmental disturbances that temporally change the degree of patch isolation, such as periodic changes in habitat availability, accurate assessment of its link with isolation is highly challenging. To analyze the effect of patch isolation on the population dynamics on different spatial scales, we simulate a three-species meta-food chain on complex networks of habitat patches and assess the average variability of local populations and metapopulations, as well as the level of synchronization among patches. To evaluate the impact of periodic environmental disturbances, we contrast simulations of static landscapes with simulations of dynamic landscapes in which 30 percent of the patches periodically become unavailable as habitat. We find that increasing mean patch isolation often leads to more asynchronous population dynamics, depending on the parameterization of the food chain. However, local population variability also increases due to indirect effects of increased dispersal mortality at high mean patch isolation, consequently destabilizing metapopulation dynamics and increasing extinction risk. In dynamic landscapes, periodic changes of patch availability on a timescale much slower than ecological interactions often fully synchronize the dynamics. Further, these changes not only increase the variability of local populations and metapopulations, but also mostly overrule the effects of mean patch isolation. This may explain the often small and inconclusive impact of mean patch isolation in natural ecosystems.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{CurtsdotterBinzerBroseetal.2011,
  author    = {Curtsdotter, Alva and Binzer, Amrei and Brose, Ulrich and de Castro, Francisco and Ebenman, Bo and Ekloef, Anna and Riede, Jens O. and Thierry, Aaron and Rall, Bjoern C.},
  title     = {Robustness to secondary extinctions comparing trait-based sequential deletions in static and dynamic food webs},
  series = {Basic and applied ecology : Journal of the Gesellschaft f{\"u}r {\"O}kologie},
  volume    = {12},
  journal   = {Basic and applied ecology : Journal of the Gesellschaft f{\"u}r {\"O}kologie},
  number    = {7},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Jena},
  issn      = {1439-1791},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.baae.2011.09.008},
  pages     = {571 -- 580},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {The loss of species from ecological communities can unleash a cascade of secondary extinctions, the risk and extent of which are likely to depend on the traits of the species that are lost from the community. To identify species traits that have the greatest impact on food web robustness to species loss we here subject allometrically scaled, dynamical food web models to several deletion sequences based on species' connectivity, generality, vulnerability or body mass. Further, to evaluate the relative importance of dynamical to topological effects we compare robustness between dynamical and purely topological models. This comparison reveals that the topological approach overestimates robustness in general and for certain sequences in particular. Top-down directed sequences have no or very low impact on robustness in topological analyses, while the dynamical analysis reveals that they may be as important as high-impact bottom-up directed sequences. Moreover, there are no deletion sequences that result, on average, in no or very few secondary extinctions in the dynamical approach. Instead, the least detrimental sequence in the dynamical approach yields an average robustness similar to the most detrimental (non-basal) deletion sequence in the topological approach. Hence, a topological analysis may lead to erroneous conclusions concerning both the relative and the absolute importance of different species traits for robustness. The dynamical sequential deletion analysis shows that food webs are least robust to the loss of species that have many trophic links or that occupy low trophic levels. In contrast to previous studies we can infer, albeit indirectly, that secondary extinctions were triggered by both bottom-up and top-down cascades.},
  language  = {en}
}