A new approach to trophic metacommunity dynamics ... (György Barabás, 210407)
Channel: Modelling in Ecology and Evolution
Date: 2021-04-14

Contributed talk by György Barabás (Linköping University, Sweden) for the session on the 7th of April 2021.

Title
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A new approach to trophic metacommunity dynamics reveals how habitat loss accelerates top species extinctions

Abstract
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We develop a novel approach to analyzing trophic metacommunities, which allows us to explore how progressive habitat loss affects food webs. Our method combines classic metapopulation models on fragmented landscapes with a Bayesian network representation of trophic interactions. This means we can repurpose known results from classic metapopulation theory for trophic metacommunities, such as ranking the habitat patches of the landscape with respect to their importance to the persistence of the metacommunity as a whole. We use this to study the effects of habitat loss, both on model communities and the plant-mammal Serengeti food web dataset as a case study. Combining straightforward parameterizability with computational efficiency, our method permits the analysis of species-rich food webs over large landscapes, with hundreds or even thousands of species and habitat patches, while still retaining much of the flexibility of explicit dynamical models.