TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sperfeld, Erik
A1  - Raubenheimer, David
A1  - Wacker, Alexander
T1  - Bridging factorial and gradient concepts of resource co-limitation:
towards a general framework applied to consumers
JF  - Ecology letters
N2  - Organism growth can be limited either by a single resource or by multiple resources simultaneously (co-limitation). Efforts to characterise co-limitation have generated two influential approaches. One approach uses limitation scenarios of factorial growth assays to distinguish specific types of co-limitation; the other uses growth responses spanned over a continuous, multi-dimensional resource space to characterise different types of response surfaces. Both approaches have been useful in investigating particular aspects of co-limitation, but a synthesis is needed to stimulate development of this recent research area. We address this gap by integrating the two approaches, thereby presenting a more general framework of co-limitation. We found that various factorial (co-)limitation scenarios can emerge in different response surface types based on continuous availabilities of essential or substitutable resources. We tested our conceptual co-limitation framework on data sets of published and unpublished studies examining the limitation of two herbivorous consumers in a two-dimensional resource space. The experimental data corroborate the predictions, suggesting a general applicability of our co-limitation framework to generalist consumers and potentially also to other organisms. The presented framework might give insight into mechanisms that underlie co-limitation responses and thus can be a seminal starting point for evaluating co-limitation patterns in experiments and nature.
KW  - Consumer
KW  - essential nutrient
KW  - factorial design
KW  - food quality
KW  - growth rate
KW  - multi-nutrient limitation
KW  - nutritional ecology
KW  - performance landscape
KW  - substitutable resource
KW  - synergistic effect
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12554
SN  - 1461-023X
SN  - 1461-0248
VL  - 19
SP  - 201
EP  - 215
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -