@article{SchneiderBroseRalletal.2016,
  author    = {Schneider, Florian D. and Brose, Ulrich and Rall, Bj{\"o}rn C. and Guill, Christian},
  title     = {Animal diversity and ecosystem functioning in dynamic food webs},
  series = {Nature Communications},
  volume    = {7},
  journal   = {Nature Communications},
  publisher = {Nature Publ. Group},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {2041-1723},
  doi       = {10.1038/ncomms12718},
  pages     = {3129 -- 3138},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {Species diversity is changing globally and locally, but the complexity of ecological communities hampers a general understanding of the consequences of animal species loss on ecosystem functioning. High animal diversity increases complementarity of herbivores but also increases feeding rates within the consumer guild. Depending on the balance of these counteracting mechanisms, species-rich animal communities may put plants under top-down control or may release them from grazing pressure. Using a dynamic food-web model with body-mass constraints, we simulate ecosystem functions of 20,000 communities of varying animal diversity. We show that diverse animal communities accumulate more biomass and are more exploitative on plants, despite their higher rates of intra-guild predation. However, they do not reduce plant biomass because the communities are composed of larger, and thus energetically more efficient, plant and animal species. This plasticity of community body-size structure reconciles the debate on the consequences of animal species loss for primary productivity.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BinzerGuillRalletal.2016,
  author    = {Binzer, Amrei and Guill, Christian and Rall, Bj{\"o}rn C. and Brose, Ulrich},
  title     = {Interactive effects of warming, eutrophication and size structure: impacts on biodiversity and food-web structure},
  series = {Global change biology},
  volume    = {22},
  journal   = {Global change biology},
  publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell},
  address   = {Hoboken},
  issn      = {1354-1013},
  doi       = {10.1111/gcb.13086},
  pages     = {220 -- 227},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {Warming and eutrophication are two of the most important global change stressors for natural ecosystems, but their interaction is poorly understood. We used a dynamic model of complex, size-structured food webs to assess interactive effects on diversity and network structure. We found antagonistic impacts: Warming increases diversity in eutrophic systems and decreases it in oligotrophic systems. These effects interact with the community size structure: Communities of similarly sized species such as parasitoid-host systems are stabilized by warming and destabilized by eutrophication, whereas the diversity of size-structured predator-prey networks decreases strongly with warming, but decreases only weakly with eutrophication. Nonrandom extinction risks for generalists and specialists lead to higher connectance in networks without size structure and lower connectance in size-structured communities. Overall, our results unravel interactive impacts of warming and eutrophication and suggest that size structure may serve as an important proxy for predicting the community sensitivity to these global change stressors.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{CeulemansGaedkeKlauschiesetal.2019,
  author    = {Ceulemans, Ruben and Gaedke, Ursula and Klauschies, Toni and Guill, Christian},
  title     = {The effects of functional diversity on biomass production, variability, and resilience of ecosystem functions in a tritrophic system},
  series = {Scientific Reports},
  volume    = {9},
  journal   = {Scientific Reports},
  publisher = {Macmillan Publishers Limited},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {2045-2322},
  doi       = {10.1038/s41598-019-43974-1},
  pages     = {16},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {Diverse communities can adjust their trait composition to altered environmental conditions, which may strongly influence their dynamics. Previous studies of trait-based models mainly considered only one or two trophic levels, whereas most natural system are at least tritrophic. Therefore, we investigated how the addition of trait variation to each trophic level influences population and community dynamics in a tritrophic model. Examining the phase relationships between species of adjacent trophic levels informs about the strength of top-down or bottom-up control in non-steadystate situations. Phase relationships within a trophic level highlight compensatory dynamical patterns between functionally different species, which are responsible for dampening the community temporal variability. Furthermore, even without trait variation, our tritrophic model always exhibits regions with two alternative states with either weak or strong nutrient exploitation, and correspondingly low or high biomass production at the top level. However, adding trait variation increased the basin of attraction of the high-production state, and decreased the likelihood of a critical transition from the high- to the lowproduction state with no apparent early warning signals. Hence, our study shows that trait variation enhances resource use efficiency, production, stability, and resilience of entire food webs.},
  language  = {en}
}