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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jordan CuffORCiD, Professor Darren Evans, Dr Fredric WindsorORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Nutrients can shape ecological interactions but remain poorly integrated into ecological networks. Concepts like nutrient-specific foraging nevertheless have the potential to expose the mechanisms structuring complex ecological systems. Nutrients also present an opportunity to predict dynamic processes, such as interaction rewiring and extinction cascades, and increase the accuracy of network analyses. Here, we propose the concept of nutritional networks. By integrating nutritional data into ecological networks, we envisage significant advances to our understanding of ecological processes from individual to ecosystem scales. We show that networks can be constructed with nutritional data to illuminate how nutrients structure ecological interactions in natural systems through an empirical example. Throughout, we identify fundamental ecological hypotheses that can be explored in a nutritional network context, alongside methods for resolving the networks.Nutrients influence the structure and complexity of ecological networks through mechanistic processes including nutritional niche differentiation, functional responses, landscape diversity, ecological invasions and ecosystem robustness. Future research on ecological networks should consider nutrients when investigating the drivers of network structure and function.
Author(s): Cuff JP, Evans DM, Vaughan IP, Wilder SM, Tercel MPTG, Windsor FM
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Animal Ecology
Year: 2024
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 30/06/2024
Acceptance date: 29/05/2024
Date deposited: 29/05/2024
ISSN (print): 0021-8790
ISSN (electronic): 1365-2656
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.14124
DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.14124
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