Consumer community structure and stability

• Applicants: Dr. Anne Ebeling; Dr. Jessica Hines, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Alexandra-Maria Klein; Professor Dr. Stefan Scheu; Professor Dr. Wolfgang W. Weisser
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 163658437

Consumer communities rely on plants for food and habitat. Global declines in biodiversity have led to concern that less diverse plant communities will not be able to sustain complex consumer communities. Our proposed research has three work packages that will evaluate the influence of plant diversity on the structural and temporal stability of consumer communities. Specifically, (1) We will use community and network metrics to evaluate the influence of plant diversity on the structure of aboveground and belowground consumers communities. (2) We will investigate how plant diversity influences the temporal stability of consumer communities at four different temporal resolution: general trends in development of the consumer community through time, inter-annual deviations of consumer community from general trends, intra-annual variation in consumer community throughout the growing season, and changes in consumer community before and after an intense flooding disturbance. (3) To test the generality of our results, we will compare our results showing consumer network response to changes in plant diversity with similar metrics reported in other ecosystems and experiments. A key innovation of our research is that we consider not only changes in patterns of consumer community composition, but also changes in the complexity of species interactions that provide mechanistic underpinning of those patterns. To do this we have developed one of the most well-resolved food webs in the world. Considered together, these three proposed work packages will provide a synthetic evaluation of how changes in plant diversity can influence the ability of ecosystems to support complex consumer communities.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1451: Exploring Mechanisms Underlying the Relationship between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Gerlinde B. de Deyn; Professor Dr. Nico Eisenhauer; Professorin Dr. Yvonne Oelmann; Professor Dr. Wim van der Putten; Privatdozentin Dr. Christiane Roscher; Dr. Michael Rzanny; Professor Dr. Teja Tscharntke; Dr. Winfried Voigt