Linking resource competition and biodiversity in meta-ecosystems
Final Report Abstract
The DFG project enabled an ecological research on resource competition to reveal important consequences of the effects of spatial and temporal environmental variability on species diversity. This project contributes to a deeper understanding of the processes sustaining the diversity of primary producers. It shows that the competitive species traits play a crucial role for the relationships between resource distributions and coexistence of species with a potential both to increase and to decrease species diversity with changing dispersal rates. The project also reveals that phytoplankton richness can be strongly affected by both seasonal and diel light fluctuations. Our analysis of the experimental data has shown, however, that the growth rate and therefore competition outcome strongly depends on food stoichiometry, temperature and the size of competitors. Thus, for the future work it is important to study the combined effects of these factors in more detail under spatially and temporally variable conditions.
Publications
- 2016. Unifying ecological stoichiometry and metabolic theory to predict production and trophic transfer in a marine planktonic food web. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 371:20150270
Moorthi, S. D., J. A. Schmitt, A. Ryabov, I. Tsakalakis, B. Blasius, L. Prelle, M. Tiedemann, et al.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0270) - 2018. Diel light cycle as a key factor for modelling phytoplankton biogeography and diversity. Ecological Modelling 384:241–248
Tsakalakis, I., M. Pahlow, A. Oschlies, B. Blasius, and A. B. Ryabov
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2018.06.022)
