Refine
Document Type
- Article (11)
- Habilitation Thesis (1)
- Postprint (1)
Language
- English (13)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (13)
Keywords
- food webs (4)
- community ecology (2)
- compensatory dynamics (2)
- consumer diversity (2)
- early-warning signals (2)
- functional diversity (2)
- metabolic theory (2)
- rapid evolution (2)
- regime shifts (2)
- stable states (2)
- top-down control (2)
- Activity respiration (1)
- Allometric trophic network model (1)
- Allometry (1)
- Biodiversität (1)
- Dispersal (1)
- Disturbance (1)
- Energy transfer (1)
- Food web (1)
- Metacommunity dynamics (1)
- Metagemeinschaften (1)
- Nahrungsnetze (1)
- Patch isolation (1)
- Stability (1)
- Synchronization (1)
- Trophic transfer efficiency (1)
- Turing instability (1)
- allometry (1)
- anthropogener globaler Wandel (1)
- anthropogenic global change (1)
- biodiversity (1)
- bioenergetic model (1)
- biomass-trait feedback (1)
- complex food webs (1)
- dispersal (1)
- dispersal mortality (1)
- diversity (1)
- ecology (1)
- ecosystem functioning (1)
- exploitation (1)
- extinctions (1)
- fitness gradient (1)
- food chain (1)
- food-web efficiency (1)
- foodweb (1)
- functional (1)
- funktionelle Diversität (1)
- generalists (1)
- global change (1)
- landscape structure (1)
- machine learning (1)
- meta-community (1)
- metacommunities (1)
- metacommunity (1)
- metacommunity dynamics (1)
- nutrient (1)
- predator (1)
- production (1)
- random forest (1)
- self-organisation (1)
- size structure (1)
- source-sink dynamics (1)
- spatio-temporal pattern (1)
- specialists (1)
- temporal variability (1)
- top (1)
- trait diversity (1)
- trait-based aggregate model (1)
- Ökologie (1)
- Ökosystemfunktionen (1)
Institute
Allometric trophic network (ATN) models offer high flexibility and scalability while minimizing the number of parameters and have been successfully applied to investigate complex food web dynamics and their influence on food web diversity and stability. However, the realism of ATN model energetics has never been assessed in detail, despite their critical influence on dynamic biomass and production patterns. Here, we compare the energetics of the currently established original ATN model, considering only biomass-dependent basal respiration, to an extended ATN model version, considering both basal and assimilation-dependent activity respiration. The latter is crucial in particular for unicellular and invertebrate organisms which dominate the metabolism of pelagic and soil food webs. Based on metabolic scaling laws, we show that the extended ATN version reflects the energy transfer through a chain of four trophic levels of unicellular and invertebrate organisms more realistically than the original ATN version. Depending on the strength of top-down control, the original ATN model yields trophic transfer efficiencies up to 71% at either the third or the fourth trophic level, which considerably exceeds any realistic values. In contrast, the extended ATN version yields realistic trophic transfer efficiencies 30% at all trophic levels, in accordance with both physiological considerations and empirical evidence from pelagic systems. Our results imply that accounting for activity respiration is essential for consistently implementing the metabolic theory of ecology in ATN models and for improving their quantitative predictions, which makes them more powerful tools for investigating the dynamics of complex natural communities.